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I am not a graphic designer. I can't draw stick figures well, and I always wear jeans, khakis, or black pants because I've been told they match everything.

But I've worked with enough graphic designers through the years to know that there are rules to working in a given medium, and there are limitations to that medium as well. For example, if you're making a rack card, those are a certain fixed dimension. You may want to make a bigger design, but you have to work within the limitations of the medium - in this case, the paper, which must fit in the spot on a rack. Perhaps your client only has enough money to afford 2 colors, or 4 colors on one side and black and white on the other. Again, a medium limitation. Yet you never hear print designers complaining about these limitations. They're part of the job; they go with the territory.

I also assume, as a code geek, that I don't know a darn thing about working in print. I hear terms like "4 color" or "bleed" tossed around, and I eventually figure out what they mean. I own a copy of InDesign, and I know where the text tool is. These things absolutely do not make me a print design expert. If I need something printed, I always hire someone who knows what they're doing, like Meg McCarthy.

The web is also a design medium, which is radically different from the print world. Many of the print designers I've worked with through the years think of web as "wow, I can use any color I want, not just the Pantone palette" and "look, I can make the pictures move!"

The web is NOT like having a TV playing in your tri-fold brochure. The web is SOFTWARE. Websites are more similar to Microsoft Word than they are to a book or a brochure. You never know what someone is going to do with Microsoft Word, and you don't know what someone will want to do on your website, either, particularly if you're incorporating Web 2.0 features.

Websites have standards, just like standards in printing. For example, there's a common link on most websites called "About Us" or just "About". Certain items come to mind that are commonly found behind this label: organization background, history, board of directors, management, sometimes employment, sometimes branch office listings, things like that. If you call that "about" link something else, you're making people slow down and think about what you're really trying to say. They're looking for the word "About" on your site. You say "Company". They have to pause and think: is Company the same thing as About?

And WHY did you call this "Company" instead of "About"? Perhaps it had something to do with your branding? Are you just trying to be "different"? Are you questioning why everyone does it this way, the "About" way, and you're trying to stand out from the pack?

GREAT! Branding definitely has a place on the web.  Standing out from the pack does also. But doing it in your navigation is the worst possible location on your whole website for doing this.

Think about all of the programs that run on your computer, Mac or PC. Nearly every one of them has a File menu with New, Open, Save, Save As, Print, and Exit on it. Nearly every program has an Edit menu with Cut, Copy, and Paste on it, and nearly always the shortcuts for those are Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V (on PC).

Ever worked with a program that changed those cut/copy/paste shortcuts? Or decided to put the Save option under the Help menu?  No? Have you asked why? It's not a technological limitation. Those software engineers could put those items anywhere and make the shortcuts anything. The reason why is those companies went out of business, because Cut was Ctrl-T instead, and Help was located under the File menu where no one thought to look for it, and no one could remember the exceptions in this program.

Navigation should be standardized. Don't be creative. Don't be cute. Be "hopelessly boring". Your visitors, who find your navigation and what's behind it to be similar to the way other websites work, will thank you and think of your site as "user friendly". 

I have yet to meet anyone who says their brand is about obsfucation,  making things difficult for site visitors, wasting visitor's time, or making things impossible to figure out. Yet so many sites are designed with non-standard navigation, big photos with no context, and pretty Flash movies, that this is what the brand conveys: Our Branding Exercise is more important than what you want or the time it takes you to get it.

 If you're Coke or McDonald's, pretty much everyone knows what you do and you don't need to explain it on your home page. But if you're not that big and famous, you need to explain what you do on your home page. That explanation needs to be in HTML text of a readable size, and relatively easy to find. The graphics on that home page should support that "elevator speech". With those cues, a visitor should figure out who you are and what you do in about 5 seconds, and in another second, they can figure out where else they can go on your website and what they expect to find based on the navigation names.

Oh, but it's not "pretty" and it doesn't convey the brand? Then perhaps you need to readjust your definition of how your brand should translate to the web. Be helpful, friendly, quick to deliver information, and make things easy to find. Make it a joy to do business with you because it's so easy to get in and get out. The eye candy is great and everyone loves a pretty picture. But if I just want to find out your business hours, getting me to that information quickly and easily, with little thinking/analyzing of your site and its structure, is far more important than your Flash introduction.