well, I know declaring the menu

<ul id="menu" style="visibility: hidden">

will make it invisible, the only issue with that is that the page will have blank space for that time frame where the menu code would go. IE:

<ul id="menu" style="visibility: hidden">
<li>list</li>
<li>list</li>
<li>list</li>
</ul>
Welcome to my site!

Would have your page come up like:
==================
(blank line)
(blank line)
(blank line)

Welcome to my page!
----------------------------------------
Where as right now your page has (blank line) replaced with the actual list items.