Guidelines in designing intuitive navigation

I have a site with about 6 loosely related items/pages where a user might want to navigate. I'm a bit stuck trying to design an intuitive layout.

At the moment I have a list of those 6 items on the left hand navigation, but it feels like the items don't belong together. I'm considering rather creating a landing page, that has a link to the relevant section together with a short description of what the section does.

Are there specific guidelines to creating such a landing page? Or how will you set out the navigation to a list of sections that are loosely related? Note that some of these sections could consist of multiple pages