You want to hard code the menu in html? Thats possible but it would make things harder to maintain. If you create your pages first then you can hard code a menu but after that when you add new pages since the dynamic menu is not there the new pages will not appear in the menu and you'll have to hard code it again. Also the dynamic menu is driven by user roles so the user only sees pages they are allowed to see by their roles, you would lose that functionality with hard coding.
What I would recommend is that you take a look at the 2 new skins in the new 2.1.4 release (splitmenu1 and splitmenu2)
If you change the admin page to have the home page as its parent then you could have a hard coded menu across the top but if logged in as admin you would have an addtional menu on the left with the sub pages under home (ie the admin page). You would only want to hard code pages in the top that are available to all users. You'll notice in these 2 skins that I moved the SiteMenu to the top header section of layout.Master (and changed the Direction to Horizontal) and added PageMenu to the left side and also added a new SiteMapDataSource control to the top of the skin which is what the PageMenu binds to
<asp:SiteMapDataSource ID="PageMapDataSource" runat="server" ShowStartingNode="false" />
I would get the site working using both SiteMenu and Page menu and arrange your page hierarchy so that only pages for all users are in the top, then remove the SiteMenu from the top of the skin and hard code your desired menu using html/images or whatever you wish. This way you could still use a dynamic menu on the left side and still add pages to the site as long as they are beneath the top level pages.
Hope this makes sense. You'll have to compare between skins that have the parts that you want and look also in the css because its a little different for horizontal menus.
layout.Master and style.css are the main files in the skin to control layout.
Joe