I'm creating a site and need a little advice about the structure. I generally use what I'll call a silo structure for the simplicity of this discussion. I basically have a homepage that links to category pages, and then you have all the normal silo stuff from there.

I don't want to get into a discussion if that's the right way to structure a site necessarily, but we can if it doesn't turn into a big flame war between people selling SEO services.

My question is I'm in the early stages of developing a large site. It will have a lot of what I would call traditional category pages, so it seems like I need a "silo" landing page where all of these category pages reside.

Something like this:

Home
Silo
Category
article
article
Category
article
article
Silo
Category
article
article
Category
article
article

That's all well and good when the site is large enough to support it. But in the early stages it seems like it's going to be a little odd having just a couple silo pages and a couple category pages.

Any advice? As it stands right now I'm going to have approximately 8-10 silo pages and 10-15 categories per silo landing page, then an unknown number of articles over time.

The intent is for the site to be structured in a way to grow to a very large site.

I'll be doing the content creation my self (insert content in place of article if you'd like), so it will be a long process. I don't want to wait until I have 100 pieces of content up before flipping the switch, so to speak.

My plan right now is to focus on two Silos and get a reasonable amount of content on them. They will each start with one category, and probably 5-10 articles each.

The homepage will have some text, possibly a video or two, and then navigation to the silos.

With only 2 silos to get to from the homepage I'm afraid visitors will want more.

I'm really at a loss here.

Option 2 is to just skip the Silo landing pages all together and link the categories directly from the homepage. Considering there will over a 100 eventually it seems like that get's a little daunting to have all that on the homepage, but maybe the best approach since I'm building it slowly.

I'm that case I'm thinking the structure would be:

Home
Category
Article
Article
Category
Article
Article
Category
Article
Article

It's a flatter structure, but maybe that's better.

Any thoughts?

Sorry for the long rambling post. I just don't want to end up spending 1,000 hours on a site only to wish I'd organized it differently.

For those wondering, all navigation will be in a sidebar, no static navigation. It will be a true silo structure (or that's the plan anyway).

All articles link to the category, articles link within the silo, etc.

I'm looking at it from an SEO perspective and a user experience perspective.

So fellow warriors - Please help! I'm starting the development tonight.