Navigation URL Suggestions

[Porter]

I'm finishing up the final touches of my phase 1 launch on my site, and I'm getting hung up on a URL / navigation design decision. I have a custom post type of "Venues", and these venues can be Bars, Restaurants, Cafes, Hotels, Resorts, etc. This gives a url structure of:

example.com/venues/the-venue-name

That's perfect for me, and I have zero desire to change this. Where I'm getting hung up, is on how to have the HUB / "Archive" (not in the normal WordPress sense) pages. My main site navigation is:

Bars
Music
Dining
Lodging
Events

Dining and Lodging both have sub categories, such as:

Dining
-Restaurants
-Cafes
-Delis
-Street Vendors

Lodging
-Hotels
-Inns
-B&B
-Resorts

I was originally thinking of having URLs like:

site.com/lodging
site.com/lodging/hotels
site.com/lodging/resorts

But that seems like it could get out of hand. Rather than have all of the sub sections, I think I should just have the main hubs (Bars, Music, Dining, Lodging, Events), and target the sub section SEO on those pages, despite it not being in the URL (part of why I was going to do sub sections). The only issue is, I'm not sure how to go about displaying the information to users if I don't have the sub-pages (site.com/lodging/hotels).

As long as I'm grouping the data properly (I'm using Advanced Custom Fields), is there a clean way to allow sorting on the main hub pages, or at another, distinct URL? For instance, if a user just wants to see street vendors (from site.com/dining), is there a way to show that on the page (AJAX?, PHP?). I essentially want to be able to sort all of the data, but not have specific sub-URLs for all of the sorting, and I'm not sure how to organize that.

Any help with sorting this out / implementation ideas would be greatly appreciated.

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[James]

Hi Porter

I think you should structure your site just like you have been doing,

regarding showing it on a page, so for example if a user goes to dining, you want them to see the dining sub-categories listed? that way they can select what they want, rather than view the whole dining section with everything?

[Porter]

Originally, before I started reading into things too much, the design was to be like so:

site.com

site.com/dining (HUB page showing visual links (think large promo images) to the various sub-sections. May include master list of all locations below.

site.com/dining/restaurants (specic to just "restaurants")

site.com/dining/cafes (specific to just "cafes")

The reason I thought against this, is because that if I specify urls to a specific sub-seciton, and change those sections, I have a redirect to deal with. If dining becomes something else (any other synonym), it breaks those links. I then have to decide how much I want to break thigns down. Is it simply resturants, delis, cafes, street vendors? Or do I go deeper and add fast food, specifics such as Mexican, Seafood, etc? The problem with the specific url design, is that there is too much categorizing to be done, which creates too many urls. I'd prefer something like:

site.com/dining (has the ability to filter / sort all venues in any way, such as just Mexican, just street vendors, etc).

OR

site.com/venues/filter (same idea)

It's just the kind of thing I need to get right, and be done with it. If I do it wrong, I'm delaing with redirects later, which I don't want.

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[James]

I see what you mean

but a filter needs to have something to filter.

you could use tags or meta value, and filter that way.

[Author]

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