Everett,
Basically what I did was create my navigation bar as "static block". Then I went into my "CMS" pages and clicked on my home page. Once there I went to the content tab on the right and then within the content box I added a widget. You can pick to place a widget in there with your "place widget" button inside the editor. So make sure you aren't hiding your editor. Once you click on it it will ask widget type. In the drop down you can choose CMS static block. Once you chose the static block of "navigation" which you all ready made it should show up on your front end.
