No navigation menu. Have we broken all the rules?

Obviously most websites have a navigation menu at the top of the site for users to get around. This is a great idea for really large websites where there are serveral tiers of categorization and many different sections. However, I felt for this medium sized website there is little point to it.

Heres why. When you're dealing with navigation menus you're often limited to just one or two words to express each section of the website. In this case I would be using something like: Galleries, Services, Products and Notebook. Ok, great if you know where you're going, but how will first time visitors know what services and products we offer or what articles are recently published in the notebook?

One solution would be to have a drop down menu which shows the sub categories but that forces the user into a very interactive, investigative experience when really what they want to do is actually read the page. People have a wonderful ability to read over a lot of information if it is nicely presented. Take a newspaper for example. A broadsheet newspaper can have many columns and many sections of information. One reasonable glance over such a page and the reader will have an idea of what's on the page.

I wanted this website to follow a similar approach. I wanted each page to show all sections of the website, presented as content that the user can read rather than just navigation links. So on each page the two right columns are reserved for these content-navigation sections. These are made of colour coded headings and a sub heading. The first item, and the others on mouse-over even show some paragraph text from that section too.

I think this approach gives the first time visitor a wonderful way of getting straight to the content of the page they are after in the left column and then naturally be led off in the direction they want to go by clicking the headings of sections that sound interesting in the right columns.

For returning visitors who know exactly where they want to go I think it may seem a little counter-intuitive at first. But I believe this is only because they come to expect a navigation menu, rather than our system actually being a problem. All they need to do is glance down the middle and right columns looking at the headings in the colour of the section they are after, which should be familiar to a returning visitor. The brain is very good at ignoring text in other colours if its only looking for one colour so that has the effect of instantly showing them only the headings in the section they are looking for.

Anyway thats the theory. I'd be interested in users feedback on this.