Would it work? Are there any reasons not to do it?
I don't have much content since it's a small website with 5 sections (About, Products, Gallery, Downloads, Contact).
Would it be recommended for the About section in the navigation menu to appear selected when the page loads?
Your website is small, so it will work well as long as your logo takes you to 'home'. Users not familiar with your site will be clicking it a lot.
You'll want to consider using either:
/ 301 redirect to /about OR/.There may be other viable options as well.
A "typical" main page is a dashboard of sorts where visitors are presented with the key information that helps them navigate further around the site. It contains some recent highlights, such as recent news, featured products, employees, or anything else.
If you don't have enough content to have a "typical" main page, do you know why people visit your site in the first place? Is it to find out about your company, your products, see some photos/drawings/screenshots, or to download content? Chances are it's not about your company but about your product but talk to some customers (current and potential) and ask them what their goal was. Their answers will be your main page content.
On a personal or small business site with minimal content. Don't make your visitors hunt for your content. Make as little navigation as possible.
Make your contact info at the top of every page. You don't need a contact "page" just so they can email you. If you want a contact form, have it appear right below the email address that clicked. No fuss and they don't leave the content that made them want to email you.
If your front page is the same as your about page, that's great, keep it that way! You don't need a separate one for each. Particularly if each page will look like a desert. Having one page with your services and about you (the service provider) will work great. Don't worry, people know how to scroll. But they have to think about where to navigate. If you don't have enough content for a home page, you can also make the content a brief synopsis of all the sections with links to them.
Consider this site I put together for a friend of mine a few years ago. http://www.fairyuna.com It sounds a lot like what you want.
Notice her contact info is on every page and it's a simple site. Looking back, I don't know why I had a "home" link... just should have had the logotext been the link as Levi suggested to you.
Summed up... contact info visible in the same place everywhere... use the least amount of navigation possible. I hope you find this useful.
If it's a small business site with minimal content, I would consider building a specific home page that only guides people to the other content. If all your content can fit in one page that's not too long, then I would just make it a one page website. (maybe two with a contact us page).
Otherwise, I would do something like the former Sofa Software where they just have a nice landing page with a few items on it to guide you. Make it as easy as possible for your users.
How about renaming your about page to home page as home is often a starting people for people in the site to navigate to different sections.You normally would associate about as the page where people want to find more information about the company while having given a small appetizer of it in the home page .However I would recommend against overloading your about us page with too much content as it can confuse people
