You should definitely read through the documentation on Structure. Pay great attention to the difference between a managed page, listing page, and an asset. I rarely use assets, but it's worth knowing what they can do for you.
For the sake of getting you started, go to Structure and click on the Channel Settings button. You will see three columns Channel | Type | Options. Let's assume you have a channel already named "static". In the type column, choose page and click the "Show in page selector" checkbox. Next in the options column, choose a pre-existing template you'd like to use for static pages. Save your Channel Settings.
Next click on the Pages button in Structure and click the Add Page button. This will create a static page. Populate the title and save the page. That page will show up in the Structure hierarchy. You can choose to add more pages at the same level by clicking the same Pages button you clicked before, or you can hover over a previous page and add a child page below it. For example:
Page (URL = page)
-- Child Page (URL = child-page)
-- Grandchild Page (URL = grandchild-page)
You should then be able to access those pages with these URLs respectively:
- /page/
- /page/child-page/
- /page/child-page/grandchild-page/
Make sure you've uploaded a minimum .htaccess file to the root directory of your site:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
# Removes index.php from ExpressionEngine URLs
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/system/.* [NC]
RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,NE,L]
# Directs all EE web requests through the site index file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
Note that you can choose to change the template you want to use for any of the pages you've added to Structure. For example, you may want to render a static page with a right column or a left column. Just create two different templates and within the entry change your Structure template to the one that fits your needs.
Keep in mind that you may want to render your entries using the exp:structure:entries tag instead of EE's exp:channel:entries. Structure and EE use two different URLs which sometimes are not exactly the same (a bone of contention with me). Using Structure's entries tag ensures that you're getting the correct URL. You must remember that with Structure you're basically co-opting EE's native way of handling how URLs are built. EE out of the box uses template_group/page to determine URLs. Structure frees you from this (as I showed above with the /page/child-page/grandchild-page example.
There's so much to say about how to use Structure. I've been using it for years and I love it. I wish you luck!
