Really stuck with custom post types, categories and more!

Hi all, this post has a few questions. I’ll try and detail this best I can as i’m really quite stuck for ideas. I’ve been offered a job i’d really like to take on but i’m not sure about how to go about writing some of the functionality. The job is a shop….not selling, just listing items

1) The site has three main areas which I would probably make using custom post types to keep the back end a bit tidier. Lets say Area1, Area2 and Area3. When you roll over each area a drop down will appear with between 4 and 9 items, children of the to level pages. (so far so good, just seems like wp_nav_menu to me! )

2) When you hover over the “child” a second drop down to the side appears (this is where I get lost), it needs to display the brands associated with each of the children on the previous menu. So far there are up to 11 brands per overall drop down, but some will be shared between different parent areas (e.g brand 1 will show in Area1 and Area3). When you click on this brand it must populate a template with all the children of that brand.

The problem I can see is im calling posts in two ways, by brand and by child category. The other issue, the way im thinking of doing it is to have a template for each brand running a unique query_posts on each template. That could be 30 or more templates alone, and the user will not be able to update the brands them-self.

Something else I must think about – if the web user clicks on any of the items, rather than use the drop downs, I must create landing pages. They will display various options to the next level down and a view all. So, if i clicked on Area1 it would show buttons/images to all child areas and an option to view all the posts that are in this area in its entirety.

3) Even if i find a decent way of doing this I have one more problem, the user would like the functionality to click on a brand (in a sidebar on the site, not in the drop down) and display all posts from one brand. As i said before that could span all 3 parent areas.

I’m generally stumped an reluctant to leave this job, can anyone shed any light on this for me? I have been at this for 12 hrs already today…. ??