EE Newbie needs some help, please

Hi-

I’m using EE for the first time to build a simple site, and I’m running into some problems just trying to figure out how to architect the site using EE’s capabilities and functionality. I’d really appreciate some advice. I’m experienced with CodeIgniter, but don’t quite get EE yet.

The site is very simple, just 10 or so pages, all of them with very much the same format, though a couple will share an embedded contact form. I’ve already built the site, and it’s working, but I have a template for every page and 5 channels of content, and this just doesn’t seem correct.

The nav heirarchy looks like this (– indicates sub pages):

Home Our Firm – Our Firm Sub Page 1 – Our Firm Sub Page 2 Investment – Investment Sub Page 1 – Investment Sub Page 2 Contact

The goal is to have a clean URL for each page, e.g.

thissite.com/home thissite.com/our-firm thissite.com/our-firm-sub-page-1

I’m thinking that I can create a single channel: pages, and move all page content into there, and then have the template load from the url segment. But this would lead to urls like:

thissite.com/pages/our-firm

Any suggestions on how this could be built in EE the “right” way, so that I don’t have to add new channels and new templates for those channels every time they want a new page?

Thank you for any help.

-Jay

• I’ve purchased and worked through Boyink!’s book, read tutorials on ee-train, and looked through these forums. There’s something I am just not getting about how to structure site content. Any thoughts welcome.