Micro to Mini to Medium to HUGE in WP?

I have decided to use WP to create a "review site". Notice: I said site, and not blog, because I'm not planning on BLOGGING (for the most part). I am planning on writing a review page, linking it to a parent, publishing it, and moving on to the next one. I'm using WP to simplify things (page-creation, enable users to leave comments, menus, etc.).

Currently, I have the site set up such that each item being reviewed is a PAGE, not POST, that allows comments. For now, these pages all use the same template.

I have set the PARENT attribute for each page, to create a hierarchy.

Think of this example site...

US-States-Starting-With-A.com
Alabama.htm
Alaska.htm
Arizona.htm
Arkansas.htm

I want to set this up so that I can expand the site to US-States.com and "move" the US-States-Starting-With-A.com contents under US-States.com without disrupting the whole US-States-Starting-With-A.com content.

US-States.com would be laid out like this:

US-States.com
US-States-Starting-With-A
Alabama.htm
Alaska.htm
Arizona.htm
Arkansas.htm
US-States-Starting-With-B
US-States-Starting-With-C
...
US-States-Starting-With-Z

Hopefully it's clear that I want to build the site from the "ground" up. I will build very specific pages, and then build more general pages at a higher level. I believe I will just have to link them together correctly using the PARENT attribute for each page to accomplish what I want.

So - some questions:

1) Am I going about this the right way?

2) I plan on back-linking to each individual review page and having the link juice flow UP to the MAIN site. Realistic or not?

3) My template will have a PHP-created menu that contains the "children" of a particular page. I found this page explaining one way to accomplish this. Any reason to do it a different way?

1) I don't see any problem with your approach. It's actually quite common. Pretty much every affiliate marketer I know uses wordpress for their sites even if they are trying to make it look like a CMS or a static site. Nothing new bro..

2) It's realistic, it's a great way to get your entire site indexed and target more keywords while you're at it. Spread the authority around a little bit, it will all trickle back to your homepage naturally anyway.

3) It's called improved taxonomy, and I'm not sure why you're using "quotes" so much. These "children" pages you're referring to are ACTUALLY CALLED children pages, so no need for quotes. Same with "review site", it's called a review site, so you don't need quotes there either. Make sure you don't write your content with erroneous quotes (just an FYI).

speakeasy602 said:

3) It's called improved taxonomy, and I'm not sure why you're using "quotes" so much. These "children" pages you're referring to are ACTUALLY CALLED children pages, so no need for quotes. Same with "review site", it's called a review site, so you don't need quotes there either. Make sure you don't write your content with erroneous quotes (just an FYI).

Click to expand...

Thanks speakeasy602! I used the quotes because I've only been playing with WP for about a week and wasn't aware they are actually called children.

In my original post, I mentioned using the PHP code in the blog post I linked to.

Is it common practice to create a text widget containing the HTML/PHP mentioned in that blog post, and then add it to the sidebar - or is there a reason to not use the text widget approach for this and simply modify the page.php itself?