Developing theme as a Content Management System

[ukbob]

I'm fairly new to Wordpress and I'm finding my way around it. The Rev City theme is working well as a format for what I am looking to do - which is to set up an affiliate environment ultimately. I want to be able to harness the relationship between the blog (short post taster) and an explanation of the product/service (using pages). Consequently, the use of categories is central to the navigation. So, I simply turned the original theme nav around to have a small amount of simple blog cateogories on the top and then utilise the dropdown feature of the lower bar to link to pages (again based around categories) - which is to form the basis of my CMS. This all works satisfactorily using nested pages.

What I want to establish now, is a landing page format for each of these page categories. It could (at this stage) be as simple as returning to the format of the existing homepage of the theme (until I can get my head around evolving the stylesheet). So, in theory, I need to be calling a new 'homepage' for each top level of my navigation hierarchy. Thereafter, I can continue with the normal format and layout.

So, what I am beginning to understand is that I would probably need to have a number of homepage 'type' files managed by category ID which would be the default pages launched when someone clicks on the relevant category drop down in the menu bar? This may be the simplest way at this point to provide some layout alternatives to my sub-category content pages, where I will need to showcase certain products etc.

I have grasped the concept of adding additional default sidebars as file includes to match the page category and that works well. But I'm trying to get my head around how I develop bespoke layouts for specific, dynamically created pages - that are effectively the launch pages of deeper content - based around category management and use of tags.

It seems as this will all be achieved by utilising variations of the home.php file. But I sure could do with some pointers as to how I should alter this so that they can be called dynamically when a user clicks on my navbar dropdown menu.

The site is up, but I've got a robots noindex file in the root to prevent Google exposing this until its complete (partly because I haven't got my head around redirects etc and its easier just to work with the site where it will ultimately be found). So, it is very much a beta-site at the moment, with minimal content. It is here: http://5reasons.co.uk

I would really appreciate anyone's help who can give me an indication of what/how to attack this. I suspect it isn't overly complex, but it would save me a lot of time if I knew the quickest way to call these 'customised' pages. Many thanks!