Hi, I am fairly new to ee.  I have a site built using it but it is not a conventional site.  There is only one page and all the content exists around that page, navigated with jquery scrolling.

I want to build a conventional site:

What I want to avoid is having a massive list of channel fields in the publish drop down menu (as there is on my previous site) 

How is it best to organise the channels?  I am trying to get my head around the pages module but I will still have loads of channel entries not organised. 

I think having a channel called ‘Pages’ is the best start.  Then channel fields for each page.  Ok good….but I would need to create loads of field entries for each section of each page:

But What I want is to have another two levels to the tree structure

Any suggestions or ideas? Am I just supposed to put up with having loads of channel fields, when I want to click on a page and have all the fields for that page come up together so that Home page featured image, Home page left column and home page right column are all edited at the same time from the same entry.

EE works best when you think about content types rather than pages.

So look at your site. What types of content are there?  Looks like portfolio entries. There’s a channel. What elements make up a portfolio entry?  Those are your fields.  Get your content published and then worry about how to draw it out on the site.

You may indeed have a “Pages” channel for things like an About page etc.

And you may have a “Home” channel that only has one entry.

But making content types the building block of your site will prove out best in the end.

Excellent advice, Mike!

Indeed, Vincent, ExpressionEngine doesn’t base content publishing around the idea of pages. Instead, think about chunking up your content like Mike suggested. Let me recommend reading this article on content strategy by yours truly. It might help get you thinking in the right direction.