Could you help with category flow?

*this is a combination of two posts I have at the Suffusion forums, but I thought I would try to get an answer here, too*

Hello,
I’ve been reading here and at WP support forums, trying to figure out how to do what I am imagining, but I can’t figure it out. And I am sorry, but my site is a private membership site so I can’t link, but here is a screenshot of the front page which uses the magazine template-one large post at the top and a four tiled excerpts below:

*can’t seem to find a way to upload a photo?*

I don’t have navigational headers, but want to have a parent category called “Resources” with an image link for it in my sidebar. When that is clicked, I am picturing a page with four images that will lead to posts in four categories-books, movies, websites, magazines. Once at one of those category pages I think tiling excerpts (no text necessary but title would be good) would be best, but I would like more than the 4 I have selected in the settings for the front page, and I believe the tile settings are site-wide? Mosaic might be another option, tho’ no titles seem to appear with this style.

So my two questions are:

-Does anyone know how to setup that flow with the categories and sub-categories and image links?

-Can tile settings be different for different places?

With thanks….I am so pleased with how beautiful my site is looking with Suffusion!

Lesley

I wonder if anyone can take pity on me and give me some guidance about this if you have the time? I have been ill, but have been spending hours when I could trying to figure out how to do this. The only glimmer I found today is that perhaps “custom post types” might help set up this separate place to have category excerpts?

Is it possible to have a second page (other than my front page-page of posts-magazine template style page) that looks similar in setup but instead of most recent posts all my categories (like the front page in image in post below) it would be a separate page called “the gentle powers” and it would have a certain number of excerpts from various categories or tags (it doesn’t matter to me what sort of posts I have to make them so they show up) specifically for this area of the website.

-books
-music
-places
-movies
-gardening

It doesn’t seem like this should be so hard. When I had a shopping cart website, it was so easy to setup categories and subcategories, with thumbnail images to navigate and the items would be what I now want to be individual posts that I can keep adding to each sub-category.

Great thanks to anyone who can help.

Lesley