Drupal path alias routing to homepage (<front> page) when link is clicked in the main menu

Question

I have been slaving over this issue for 6 hours now and it seems so simple but I can't seem to figure it out. I am creating a Drupal site for a client and I have never used Drupal before, Ive picked up on basic custom theming and everything was going well until I came across an error with path alias's.

I have booted up a new Drupal project to replicate the problem in its most basic form. I have an about us page running on the bartik theme, I have deleted all content. All I have is a basic page called About that is node/1. The main menu has one link in it that links to node/1. I have an alias for the page called "about".

PROBLEM:

When I click on the about link in the menu, the url displays localhost:8888/about, exactly what I want it to say however it just reloads the content of the initial homepage that I deleted. However if I type node/1 into the url bar or take the "about" alias away the page loads just as it should and displays the about content. I have tried flushing the page cache and that doesn't do anything. I have looked a plethora of tutorials on how to make page alias's and they all seem very straight forward, I can't seem to figure this out. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: I installed the pathauto module and made the default pattern for all content aliases to be content/[node:title]. When I add a new alias like content/about it works fine but I still can't get just about to work with the pattern just [node:title].

Thanks,

Tyler