Building Multi-City Directory Site Have Questions

Looking for answers from wordpress Geniuses!

Don’t want to muddy the water too much and throw in the whole kitchen sink, but here’s what we’re doing, and my biggest “discussion” questions at the moment.

We are building an overall site that will have:

Multiple Channels (we’ll call them)
– Business Services
– Home Services

Multiple Cities (with a landing page for each city)

An example would be:

Miami Home Services (ok so far?)

In each city there will be local businesses who are members. The whole point of each “local” landing page is to provide a directory of businesses by category.

Now…

What I’m wondering is what is the best combination of page/post/category/tag system to get the type of thing I want?

I’ve been exploring, and I’m thinking we can have a custom post type with custom fields for “Member Listings” and we can use categories to define what business category they area (eg Plumber). We can even use tags to define the additional deeper market areas they services — like communities, etc.

But my question is how do we “assemble” the landing page? Is the landing page (which is a local market) a post? Is it a category that assembles other stuff?

The link would look like this:

mainsiteurl.com/home-services/miami (that would be the landing page for Miami Home Services for example

So would “miami” be a page, a post, or a category that collects posts in that category?

If I could complicate it just a bit more. Each market/city has a “director” — a local manager.

That manager will have multiple local groups, but each group will only have one manager.

So, once again, I’m thinking a custom post type with custom fields for “Director”

But, again, wondering how this all fits together.

Any wordpress geniuses out there care to toss in your two cents?

Thanks,
JP