Need help with assigning block regions to custom content type.

Hello drupallers

I am a designer in the process of learning Drupal. I find the process not easy since most, if not all the documentation seems to be written from the perspective of programmers or tech people: I seem to be missing knowledge that is assumed and things are explained in ways that do not quite relate to the designer end of the universe. I find lot of drupal stuff not necessarily very difficult, it is just explained from a perspective that is not easy to relate to from a designer background. In learning Drupal, many a time I have found myself exclaiming: Ooh, is that what they mean! Why don’t they just say so!! Of course “they” did, but for me in order to be intelligible I somehow need to find the translation of what is being said.

Anyway my drupal skills so far are: I can manage basic installation and configuration, can set up a simple site and have done some basic theme tweaking. I am now working on a bit more complicated site and I need some help with the navigation I’ve envisioned.

The problem:
This is the situation: My site’s main nav has 5 primary links, which are like the 5 main categories of information. An example to clarify: a department store with say a food section, shoes section, men’s clothing, women’s clothing and toys. On the site I want specific blocks appear per section. For instance if you click on the main category toys, speciefic block regions with content about toys appear in the left sidebar, regions that do not appear on the other sections, and visa versa.

The solution (?)
After doing research how to achieve the above in drupal, I am thinking of doing it like this:
- Create a content type for every main category, i.e. content type shoes, content type, toys etc.
- Create for every content type its own template from node.tpl.php, i.e. shoes.tpl.php, toys.tpl.php, etc
- Define block regions for every category in .info file and somehow connect the regions to the specific template files of each content type.

Questions:
- Will the above solution work? And is it a good way to go about it?
- If so, I have at the moment yet no idea how to go about connecting specific regions to specific content type. Tips and guidance on this is most welcome, (Handbook contains only some info about how to do it in drupal 5, I could not find anything on how to do it in drupal 6)
- If not, does anyone have a better/ simpler idea perhaps?

I hope my problem is clear and you do not need a translation for it :-)

Thanks very much for your input!
Artaud