What is a branding strategy and why is it important for your website?

A few weeks ago I wrote about why I rebranded my business after 16 years, and how the rebranding process itself helped me gain clarity in my focus, passion, and overall business.

This time I’ll hone in more on what a branding strategy is, what is typically included in a branding package when working with a professional brand designer, and how having one makes your web design process more efficient.

What is a branding strategy package?

A branding strategy gives you an entire plan that instructs you on when and what brand collateral to use, how to use it, and what it all means when it comes together.

A branding designer will deliver digital files, and/or physical brand collateral such as your:

• Logo 
• Fonts and Typography
• Colour Palette
• Brand voice
• Design assets

Having more than one type of logo

If you’ve been working with only one logo option for your brand you may have already discovered the drawback to:

• Not having a print-ready, greyscale logo
• Not having a logo with a transparent background 
• Not having a logo you can resize without losing quality
• Having only a vertical logo to use in horizontal spaces, like your website
• Your logo can’t be cropped to fit icons, profiles, avatars, and other third-party platforms

There are several styles or “layout options” for logos that all serve different purposes. Having your logo optimized for different usages not only saves you time when you need to supply your logo in a certain format, but you can be more creative with your material by having a selection of options to choose from.

Icon Logo or Brandmark

An icon version of your logo is great to have for use in places like your website favicon or site icon, and social media profiles. These are areas where the required image dimensions are square.

If you’re using only a long horizontal logo or a wordmark you may find it difficult to crop your logo to make it fit in a square space.

Brand designers will often include a brandmark in their logo branding package, where an icon or smaller graphical version of your logo is supplied in addition to your primary logo.

Wordmark Logo

A wordmark is a style of logo that solely uses typography and the name of the business, without graphics or accompanying elements. (My original logo for BE3Designs was a wordmark.)

Vertical Logo or Stacked

A vertical or stacked logo is a combination of a brandmark and wordmark, where the wordmark often sits below the graphical component of the logo. These logos are often used in print and letterhead where contact information is displayed to the side.

When used on websites however, stacked logos can often cause unnecessary whitespace in headers by increasing their height vs accompanying content.

Horizontal Logo

A horizontal logo could be wordmark, or a combination of a brandmark and wordmark side-by-side. We see these logos most often on websites where the graphical logo is on the left and the wordmark (name of the business) sits to the right of it.

B&W or Greyscale Logo

Depending on the level of detail in your primary logo, you may also want a variant that is better suited to documents and non-marketing print material. Other logos may be saved out in greyscale mode, as all black, or all white from their source files.

These types of logos are good to have on-hand when you need to work with partners or third-parties. For example, if you sponsor an event and your company logo is to be included on event branding, they’ll need it on a transparent background so they can add it to their existing material.

Depending on their background, your logo may need to be converted to a dark version or light version for best display.

Selecting your font families and typography

Using too many fonts or font pairings that don’t compliment each other can make your design or page look busy, confusing, or unprofessional.

Some fonts are also more difficult to read over others, especially when used at smaller font sizes or in larger paragraphs of text.

One of the requests that I gave my brand designer during our discovery meeting was to have an accessible font suite for use in my print and digital media. While my wordmark and logo font is custom, the fonts I use for headlines and text were selected for accessibility.

A branding strategy should include not only your font families but the typography settings around implementing headings, paragraphs, line-height, and other configurations to ensure your brand is displayed as intended.

Using an accessible color palette

Like fonts, using too many different colours or incompatible pairings can be a sign of hasty design. Colours also have to comply with online standards to ensure that your web content is accessible.

You should be aware if any of your brand colours are difficult to use in combination with other colours when it comes to legibility. You may have settled on a particular colour palette that you use in your physical storefront, but these same colours may not pass contrast compliance on your website.

You may want a complimentary colour palette to adhere to when used in certain applications, and fallback to your primary palette in less important contexts.

When I started learning more about accessibility I discovered firsthand how poor my original brand colour palette was; Oranges and yellows are some of the hardest colours to make accessible.

In my rebrand, we softened to Nectarine and Wheat, specifically outlining when and where they could be used, making Onyx and Oceanic primary colours for my text and links.

Knowing what to say and how to say it

Your brand voice says everything about you, and having something prepared surrounding the intent and context of your business gives you a solid foundation to build on when preparing content, marketing material, and messaging.

A repository of template text doesn’t mean you are regurgitating information like a robot every time you communicate about your business.

Mission statements, visions, and elevator pitches can help us understand and actualize our marketing or communication efforts.

Have you ever gone to write a social post, newsletter issue, or blog article and simply have no idea how to get started?

The process of going through a branding strategy forces you to think about why you’re in business, who your ideal clients or customers are, what they need, and how you support them with it.

Design and visual assets

The graphic design portion of your branding strategy can also start a repository of aligned media like stock photography, backgrounds, and custom graphics to bolster your brand.

For example, when I select stock photos to use as the featured images in my blog posts I filter my searches for graphics that contain orange or yellow. I do this because while these brand colours of mine are widely inaccessible for text-based content, I can use them in accompanying graphics.

Icons

Small graphical representations of content are a great way to break up text on a page. When these icons can be stylized to match your brand, it really brings everything together.

There are also other graphical assets to be found if you get a little creative. For example, I pulled an element out of my logo to create a custom, unordered list-style-type for my website.

Backgrounds

One of the requests I made during my branding design process was the creation of custom pattern backgrounds, because while my graphic designer was working on my logo, I was working on a redesign of my website to match where we were headed.

Depending on your brand’s overall design style you will either choose to use (or not):

• flat design, color blocking
• gradients
• shadows, box-shadows
• borders or strokes
• patterns
• parallax fullscreen images
• rounded vs straight corners

You want to avoid using everything, everywhere, all at one. A designer will help you hone in on the look and style you’re hoping to achieve.

Before my rebrand, BE3Designs simply used a flat design technique, using color blocking at most. I never used gradients, shadows, or background images – all I ever needed were my HEX codes. However, my 2026 rebrand pointed in an entirely different direction…

When it’s okay to start a website without a branding strategy

It’s not, don’t do it. Just kidding. It is okay to launch a website without a branding strategy in place, but in doing so you should know that you’ll face some additional struggles along the way.

If you find yourself thinking, ‘I need to get something online for my business sooner rather than later’, consider publishing a temporary landing page first. This way you can focus on what is important to you right now:

1. Brand recognition (online business card)
2. Contact information (you can be reached by your customers)
3. Top priority call-to-action (CTA)

This landing page indexed by search engines, along with a Google Business Profile, is a great organic start.

But before you consider budgeting for wider expenses like advertising or other optimization techniques: Complete your business’ brand strategy.

Why you should have a branding strategy before building your website

Other occupations use tools in their trade to help them execute their plans efficiently and expertly. Think of your branding strategy as having a full toolbox at your disposal whenever you have to produce material for your business.

A lot of people claim that your website is the most important part of your business, heck I’ve said it, but now I believe that the most important part of your business is how well you understand how to implement the message you want to deliver to your audience.

Your website is merely one of the ways you get that message across, but it’s nothing without its look/feel, content, optimization, user experience, accessibility,… you get the idea.

Top 5 reasons to complete a branding strategy before starting your website:

1. Sets the typography and colour palettes used
2. Supplies your proper logo files
3. Informs the style of web design
4. Assesses the problems your customers are trying to solve
5. Determines the voice and messaging to your audience

Another way to look at it is to consider thinking of your website as if it were a house, this analogy can help you observe all of the working components of a successful website.

Doing the appropriate steps in order have the same effects on your website. You’ll have less confusion and questions while you’re already deep in the process when you’ve answered them before you got started.

Your branding strategy gives you the confidence to build on and manage your business, knowing you’re going in the right direction.