My Website's Navigation Is Now Decided by Dice, and Honestly? Traffic Is Up

There's a moment in the mid-2000s that I think about constantly: the wild west of personal homepages. Geocities neighborhoods, guestbooks, marquees, hit counters, a MIDI file auto-playing Enya whether you asked or not. It was chaotic and garish and alive in a way that modern personal sites — with their Inter fonts and their tasteful muted sage palettes — have systematically sanded away.

Somewhere along the line, "good web design" came to mean "indistinguishable from every other good web design." So I ran an experiment in regression. For one month, I let a random number generator make my user interface decisions. Here's the logbook.

The Rules of Engagement

The setup was simple. I wrote a script that, every Monday, rolled dice on four things:

1. Navigation labels — drawn from a pool of 40 words, ranging from reasonable ("Work," "Contact") to unhinged ("Lobby," "The Good Stuff," "Egress")
2. Color scheme — random HSL values, no taste filter applied
3. Footer text — randomly assembled from sentence fragments
4. Button hover behavior — including one week where all buttons spun 360 degrees on hover

Everything else stayed normal. Content untouched. Just the chrome surrendered to chance.

Week One: Immediate Regret

The first roll gave me a navigation bar reading: Home / Musings / Egress / Lime / Contact. "Lime" linked to my archive. The color scheme was a brown-on-maroon combo that a friend described, accurately, as "the inside of a wallet."

Bounce rate, predictably, spiked. I nearly pulled the plug on day four.

Week Two: The Turn

Then something weird happened. My analytics showed visitors clicking more pages per session than the curated version of the site ever produced. The average had been 1.3 pages. It climbed to 2.8.

Why? I have a theory, and it connects back to web history. When everything looks like a template, people stop reading and start pattern-matching — scan, skim, leave. But a navigation item called "Egress" is a pattern break. You click it because your brain needs to resolve the ambiguity. Unfamiliarity, it turns out, is a feature we accidentally deleted.

The old web was sticky not because it was well-designed but because it was specific. Every Geocities page was somebody's actual personality leaking through the markup.

Weeks Three and Four: What Broke, What Worked

What broke: accessibility, briefly — one roll produced yellow text on a white background, which I vetoed on ethical grounds (the dice get one veto per month, that was mine). The spinning buttons were, and I say this with love, completely intolerable.

What weirdly worked:

• The footer, which one week generated the sentence fragment "assembled in the dark by an unpaid committee" — three separate visitors quoted it in emails
• A lavender-and-chartreuse palette that I genuinely cannot defend and will absolutely use again
• "The Good Stuff" as an archive label, which outperformed "Archive" in clicks by a factor of four

The Case Against Over-Curation

Here's my argument, and I'll die on this hill: most personal websites are over-curated to the point of anonymity. We adopted startup design conventions to look professional, and in doing so, we made our homepages interchangeable with ten million others.

Randomness worked as a diagnostic tool precisely because it exposed how little personality the curated version had. When a dice roll produces a more memorable site than your careful taste, your careful taste might be the problem.

I'm not saying ship yellow-on-white. I'm saying the next time you redesign your About page for the ninth time, consider whether anyone would notice if you rolled dice instead. Mine noticed when I did. That's more than they noticed before.

The dice have been retired. "The Good Stuff" stays, though. Some chaos earns tenure.