Sidebar buttons navigation

I'm building a new website for my own. I'm a student but in my spare time I try to earn a bit by being webdeveloper.

However from now on I want to focus a lot more on user experience, maximum conversion,...

I had an idea to use a special kind of navigation bar. Demo: https://jsfiddle.net/5s9ayj1g/4/

But I have the following questions regarding that:

  1. Is this less/equally/more user-friendly than a standard navigation menu?
  2. Will those images be more attracting to hover or click than standard text navigation?
  3. Will this finally result in more leads (users browsing the whole website)?

And any other remarks on this?