Seven Days, Seven Strangers, Seven Names for 'Home': The Week My Navigation Bar Went to Auction

Every website has a skeleton. It's the row of words at the top of the page — Home, About, Contact, Archive — so familiar that most visitors stop seeing it entirely, the way you stop hearing the hum of your refrigerator. For one week in March, I decided to find out what happens when you let strangers redraw that skeleton every single day.

The rules were simple, almost insultingly so. Each morning at 9 a.m. Eastern, I opened a bidding window. Anyone could submit a new name for any button, along with a bid starting at one cent. Highest bid won, and the site's navigation updated at midnight. No vetoes, no taste committee, no appeal process. If someone wanted 'Archive' to read 'The Basement,' then 'The Basement' it was.

The Ledger of Small Money

The first thing you should know is that nobody got rich. Total revenue for the week: $3.84. The single largest bid was 47 cents, placed by someone who wanted 'Home' renamed 'Base Camp' and included the note, 'this is where I return from the mountain.' I paid more than that for a vending machine Snickers last Tuesday.

But the money was never the point — it was the admission fee. A free rename form would've been a suggestion box. Charging even a penny made it a transaction, and transactions, apparently, make people feel ownership. Bidders didn't just rename buttons. They defended their choices. When Day 3's winner rebranded 'Contact' as 'The Void,' a losing bidder emailed me twice to argue that 'The Abyss' was structurally different and morally superior. Neither is correct. Both were deeply felt.

'Home' Had a Whole Campaign

You'd think the boring buttons would bore people. Wrong. 'Home' turned out to be the most contested real estate on the site, changing hands four times in seven days. It was 'Base Camp,' then 'The Homestead,' then — briefly — 'Ohio,' which I want to stress made no sense because I have never lived in Ohio and the bidder offered no explanation. The note field just said 'trust me.'

On Day 6, someone paid 31 cents to rename it back to 'Home.' Their entire bid note read: 'It was always fine.' Which is, I'd argue, the most honest piece of user feedback any website has ever received. Most people don't want your navigation to be interesting. They want it to be legible. The counter-revolution arrived by Thursday, led by a person who just wanted to find the contact page without a metaphor in the way.

About Became a Battlefield

Here's the part I didn't see coming: the 'About' link was where the real fights happened. Every other button got renamed for comedy or vibes. 'About' got renamed like it meant something.

Over the week it was, in order: 'The Lore,' 'Exhibit A,' 'Who?, 'The Author's Statement,' 'Origins,' 'Receipts,' and finally — on the last day, by the week's highest bid, a staggering 47 cents — 'About.' Someone paid maximum price to restore the original. The note: 'Some doors should have signs.'

I think I understand why. 'Home' is where you are; 'About' is who you're dealing with. Renaming 'Home' is redecorating. Renaming 'About' is forging an ID. One bidder refused to participate in that button at all, writing, 'you can auction the furniture but the deed stays in the drawer.' Strangers on a website with a name that means nothing took the question of what is this place and who runs it dead seriously.

What the Skeleton Knows

By Sunday night, the site's navigation read: Ohio, The Author's Statement, The Void, The Basement. It looked like a ransom note assembled by a very polite kidnapper. And yet — traffic barely dipped. Returning visitors adapted within a day or two, which says something mildly depressing about how little any of us actually read navigation labels. We navigate by position and muscle memory. The words are decoration.

But here's what I keep turning over: the two most fiercely defended buttons were the two that answer existential questions. Where am I? Who is this? Everything else — the archive, the contact form, the RSS feed nobody uses — could be renamed at will without protest. Turns out a navigation bar isn't infrastructure. It's a statement of self, and people will spend their nickels to have a say in it.

The experiment ended at midnight Sunday. Every button reverted to its factory name. Total cost to me: about six hours of scripting. Total earned: $3.84, which I intend to spend on a vending machine Snickers, in honor of the 47-cent poet who renamed my homepage after a mountain base.

If you're reading this and feeling a familiar itch — that little voice saying I could do better than 'The Void' — the bidding window opens again next quarter. Bring pennies. Bring convictions. The deed, however, stays in the drawer.