Hi there!
I will answer your last question first and address your earlier questions later.
WordPress, in my experience, is a really awesome tool for content management – especially if you intend on either updating content a lot or adding new content – static in nature (pages) or transitory in nature (blog type posts).
Its ‘utility’ is best highlighted when it is being used as such. Not to say it can’t be used to simply display a few pages and no blog type posts – not at all! – it’s just that you don’t really get to see all the really cool things that WordPress can do in such a circumstance.
What it allows you to do is publish content easily to a website whose design and structuring is pre-determined based on the theme setup you have. Type, post, and your brand new post or page is there.
Also, changing a traditional web page more often than not requires a person to make updates to the actual web page itself and then requires the updated page to be FTPed back to the site. WordPress eliminates the need to do this as you can manage all of your posts and pages all on one Admin panel.
Additionally, you can change the structure and design of the site in question without touching the actual content on the site. Create your own or upload a new theme and activate it and you have a new look and/or structure but still the same content, untouched.
With that said:
Structuring:
Yes, WordPress can logically structure Pages and does implement a Page hierarchy and it allows you to rearrange the listing placement of Pages.
So, you can have a URL structure that looks like this:
example.com/thecompany/mission
I myself have utilized a structure that looks like:
example.com/thewebmaster/contact/
Under my domain URL, I have a parent ‘thewebmaster’ Page/category that talks more about myself and a child Page under it called ‘contact’ which has a form where people can contact me from.
When the Pages are listed in my sidebar or navigational block, ‘thewebmaster’ parent Page can be listed with its child Pages listed underneath it.
Additionally, on that particular site, I set up my WordPress to display a custom static page as the homepage and to utilize another separate static page be the listing for all of my site update notifications (which I use WordPress’ blog functionality for).
example.com/thewebsite/site-updates
So yes, if I am understanding you correctly, the structuring you are speaking of can certainly be achieved in WordPress.
Have a look at how Vanderbilt University Magazine utilizes WordPress: HERE.
Comments:
WordPress natively allows you to manage comments to both Pages and Posts and you can activate the bundled Akismet plugin to help you filter out spam comments, too, at the same time.
Closing Comment:
Remember the Admin panel I mentioned earlier?
That is one of the beautiful and convenient things about WordPress – it manages your content and allows you to make adjustments to various parts of your site in that one Admin panel. From Pages to Posts, Comments to Spam, Plugins to Themes, WordPress puts everything at the user’s fingertips.
If you have a very complex site design, it is possible that you might have a bit of a challenge porting the design into a WordPress theme, but that really is the only potential deterrent I can see from this standpoint.
My advice?
Go to https://WordPress.com and sign up for a free WordPress account there and play around with it a bit. Get your feet wet and see what you can do with the Pages setup and layout and see how you like having everything at your fingertips in one Admin panel. ??
