The website build is the most honest thing a company ever does. More honest than the annual report, more honest than the mission statement, more honest than whatever the CEO says at the all-hands.
Your Website Explains You
There is a moment in every corporate website project when the real meeting begins. Not the kickoff, not the discovery session, not the first creative review. The real meeting happens when someone in a position of nominal authority looks at a decision — any decision, it almost doesn't matter which one — and says: can we make it rotate randomly?
This is not a design note. This is a confession.
The website build is the most honest thing a company ever does. More honest than the annual report, more honest than the mission statement, more honest than whatever the CEO says at the all-hands. Those things are composed. The website process is live — it happens in real time, under deadline, with money on the table and egos in the room. It shows you exactly how the organization actually functions when something has to get decided.
What it usually shows you is: not well.
I spent the better part of this week designing a solutions page for an enterprise mobility platform. The product is genuinely good — sophisticated, modular, built for institutions that need real infrastructure. The copy was solid. The design was confident. We had made a clear strategic choice: two flagship products featured prominently, the other six below. A hierarchy. A point of view. A page that knew what it was trying to do.
The feedback came back: would it be possible to make the models rotate randomly?
Random. On a B2B enterprise platform page. Where the buyer is a fleet manager or a municipal mobility director trying to evaluate whether this software can run their city. Make it random.
Here's what "make it random" actually means, translated from corporate into English: we cannot agree on which product matters most, so we have decided that mathematics should make the choice for us at runtime, in the browser, invisibly, without accountability.
It is the design equivalent of not calling the vote.
I have seen this move in a hundred forms. Can we A/B test it? (We don't want to commit.) What if users could choose? (We don't want to choose.) Let's see how it performs. (We'll outsource the decision to a metric we'll argue about in six months.) The logic is always the same: defer, distribute, dilute. Make the decision so diffuse that no one person can be blamed for it.
The trouble is that design doesn't work that way. Design is a series of choices, and every choice either means something or it doesn't. A hierarchy on a page means: this matters more than that. Random rotation means: nothing matters more than anything else. Which, when your product has eight distinct use cases serving distinct buyer profiles, is not a positioning strategy. It is the absence of one.
What I told them, and what convinced them in the end, was this: your buyer is not browsing. They're evaluating. They've been sent to this page — or they've arrived with a specific problem — and they need to see themselves in it within the first ten seconds. If the page doesn't know who it's talking to, the buyer concludes the product doesn't either.
Corporate Mobility and Shared Mobility are featured because they represent the two most common institutional entry points into the platform. The corporate fleet manager and the municipal mobility director. These are the buyers. Featuring them is not a design preference — it is a sales decision expressed in visual language.
That argument worked because it was in their language: buyer, entry point, sales. If I had said visual hierarchy and intentionality and point of view, I'd still be on the call.
This is the thing nobody tells you about corporate creative work. The design is rarely the hard part. The hard part is reading the organization fast enough to speak to it in the right register. Some rooms need the business case first and the design rationale second. Some rooms are the opposite. The skill isn't just knowing what's right — it's knowing which door to walk the right thing through.
Random rotation is almost never really about rotation. It's about an organization that hasn't done the work of knowing who its customer is. The website just makes that visible. It puts the internal confusion on a public URL and asks the internet to load it.
The website doesn't lie. It just takes a screenshot of the meeting and publishes it.
Joe DeLuca is a copywriter and creative developer based in Sardinia. He builds brand identity and copy systems for companies whose products deserve better words.