how to do pages, sub-pages, and things with images?

This is a little bit hard to explain.

I want to build a site that displays info about things but there’s 3 levels:

At the top level, I want to list the general category of things in a menu (each with an image in a slider with an index). Hence, menu at right, slider in center. This I would create a Page and drop a Slider in it with a bunch of images.

At the category level, I want to list the sub categories of things in the menu, again, each with an image, in a grid in the center.

Then, at the lowest level, images of things in that category in a slider. When a user clicks on an image, it brings up a light box larger version of that image.

Now, here’s really the question… How to make this easy for the person managing the content in such a system?

Ideally I think I want some sort of custom content type that includes a slide show and lets the content manager set a category and sub-category for this content.

When the content manager needs to create a new thing at the lowest level in the system, I want to avoid having them first manually create a slide show of those things and then manually create/edit the post/page at the second level items so this thing is accessible. Hence the second level (sub-category level) should in fact just be a list of slide shows showing the first image of each slide show in a grid.

I see how to do all of this manually. The problem is really that the ultimate user of the web site will never be able to use it.

What in general is the right way to attack this? Do I need to create a custom content type at all?

Michael Grant