Advice and Tips on WordPress as CMS

Hi:

I’m in the process of re-designing a site for a client who is an auto mechanic.

I’ve decided to try using WordPress as a CMS for him, because he needs to be able to quickly post and delete new cars for sale, as well as used car parts, and wordpress should be easy for him to use, as he is not super computer savvy.

So, I’m looking for some helpful advice/tips. I understand that there’s some tweaking involved, but perhaps someone who’s already done something similar to this can save me from making some obvious mistakes.

I’m thinking of using the semiologic theme/cms plugin as well as the semiologic static front page plugin. I would create my own theme for the site.

Basically what I need is this:

1. Static home page with links to other static pages. i.e. about us, contact, service etc.

2. The ‘Cars for Sale’ and ‘Parts for Sale’ would be the two ‘Categories’ for posts. I’d like to have those on the ‘home.php’ page, as well as all of the other pages.

What I’d like to show is the individual links to Cars and Parts by title, like, ‘1993 Jaguar v12’ for example, rather than showing a link for ‘Cars for Sale’ with (number) posts showing.

Partly I’d like this because it would help with search engine placement, partly because it’s just really important that they be easy to see and access anywhere in the site.

They are also not really chronological, in the sense that they don’t need to be archived like a blog post, not really sure if that will be a problem or not… Perhaps I can simply take out the ‘Archived’ section code.

3. I’d like to disable ‘comments’ for the posts, as those are not really applicable here, as in this site a post is simply an advertisement for a car or part.

4. The other essential feature is that I need a good plugin that will allow my client to upload images of cars, that can be ‘posted’ as a basic gallery, as in 5-6 thumbs of cars that will pop up the pic when hovered over, or something to that effect.

Any help on this is greatly appreciated!

mboy222