Anyone used a page instead of category template, for category page customization

So I wanted to have complete control over the display of my category pages (without using category templates), so that when people click on the category (or the main menu navigation link) it links to the posts contained in that category in a completely customizable, but manual static way that can be completely “unbloglike”.

I also wanted my posts to appear to be under a sub-directory, so:

1. I set my permalinks to: custom then: /%category%/%postname%/

2. Then what I did was create a category, let’s say “colors”. And a post with that category selected let’s say “red”.

So now the url for the post “red” looks like https://www.domain.com/colors/red/

Then to get full control over my category pages without messing with category templates or a plugin:

3. I create a page and name the page the same thing as the category. So in this example, I name the page “colors”, and for now leave it empty.

4. (Optional) Then I add the page to my menu navigation, so the page/category “colors” can be accessed sitewide

The way it is right now, all of the category links “colors” on the blog, as well as the “colors” breadcrumb, and (optional main navigation) will link to my page “colors” (www.domain.com/colors/ page. This way the default category page setup (which is by default like a mini blog with only the subset of your posts contained in that category listed), will be blank(currently), because the page created with the name “colors” will be shown instead of a category page.

5. So then I can edit the page “colors”, and manually include any links to the posts in the colors category (or other categories or whatever if I wanted). And organize as many links as I want in anyway that I want in a static page, without having to worry about older posts getting buried or anything. I’m thinking about basically having a bunch of text giving an overview of the topic (in this example colors) and then linking to the posts that I’ll to grouped into sections. I’ll have to update the page anytime I want to add a link to a new post, but I don’t have a problem doing this. Also what’s cool is I can enable comments selectively on these “category” pages(maybe just a genesis option?), which is something I might do.

So the only problem I notice, is that if any post is check marked in more than 1 category the links to that post will get messed up and will instead point you to the newly added category (very weird). So it looks like I’ll have to limit posts to be in only one category (which is fine by me, I can always link to that post in a second or third category page, my blog just won’t list the posts as being contained in multiple categories).

I couldn’t really find anything online about setting up the categories with pages like this, all I saw was category template editing or category customization plugins(which didn’t really seem to do what I want.

So I was wondering if anyone does things this way and if there are any other potential problems with this setup?

I’m concerned about broken links, search engine crawling problems, seo issues, etc. I figure it’ll probably mess up my category feeds, but I’d be ok with that. I’m like very new to wordpress so forgive me if this is just a straight up obviously stupid way to do things, it just seems to be the simplest way to setup my category pages with full control. So if anyone already knows from experience that this is a disastrous was to set things up please let me know.

And if there aren’t any problems, then this could be a solid way to setup a more traditional “static-style site” (only 1 sub-directory deep though I guess, but that’s also fine). And I can still use a blog (post’s page) that will automagically show my latest posts, and still enjoy all the traditional blog like features on those posts page.