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I love beautiful sites. Yes there is such a thing as a beautiful, sexy looking website. Now I am not taking away from Jacob Nielsen and friends… but have you visited his site lately? The word yuck comes to mind. Sure I can click on the blue underlined links easy enough, but is there anything there to capture my eye and make me want to explore the site any further. Not really.
When you go and buy a pair of shoes do you try and find the most comfortable or easy to do up and walk in or do you go for the pair that looks the best on you and suits your style. Enough said. (for the record I only own 2 pairs of shoes – so maybe not a good analogy)
When I am involved in the planning of a User Interface for a website sure Usability is of course a key consideration however design and visual aspects sometimes overrule convention/standards.
There are some beautiful sites that are very user friendly and I think the general public knows what a nav link looks like weather it is blue or orange. Now if your target market is “new users” then perhaps practice some of Jacob Nielsen's techniques but if your target market are active web users then make your site look great and work well. There is nothing wrong sacrificing a bit of usability for beauty. If it looks good enough people will want to explore it and will find their way around. While I agree that most humans are stupid not all of us are.