Creating secondary menus, that are different based on the page being viewed I'm new to Drupal development so bear with me.  I'm attempting to copy a production site that has used old school page controller organization into a newly setup Drupal 7 install.  I've set up the header, sidebar, and footer all of which will always be the same so I've created them as blocks.  

The content within those blocks is categorized into 5 categories and each one uses a slightly different layout at the top and bottom.  What is the best way of handling this situation?

Create multiple additional blocks and make sure to assign the appropriate pages to those blocks, or set up a template of sorts that can tell what blocks need to be displayed based on the category of the content.
If you want to have different layout on different pages you can use power combo Omega + Context + Delta.
Using this modules you can create different layouts, different menu items and other things on different pages without codding.

See tutorial and Theory