Your logo should headline your website being either part of the masthead or main navigation. But you cannot just plop your logo anywhere and expect your website to look better. In fact, you should be designing your logo first and then your website, so as to create your online presence around the theme of your logo using the mood, font, shape and colors of the graphic to help define your entire brand.

By building your online assets about and around your logo, it provides you (or anyone working on your content) to understand the design parameters involved. For example when creating a new page layout, graphical elements like navigation buttons, or titles and sub titles. If you happen to be working with anyone with any type of graphical experience, they will probably be asking you about this visual framework anyway. That’s because visual consistency is an integral part of branding your business or product, online or off.

If your logo does not fuse professionally with your website, it can cause a lack of visual continuity. That in turn can create a lack of appeal, but more importantly a hard-to-describe uneasiness about what someone is looking at. Most people might not even recognize it on a conscious level, but it’s more like one of those – something doesn’t feel right feelings – that you might get in a restaurant that has no ambience. Now you might feel such an abstract issue is not really important, but for long term success online it is absolutely critical, because that subtle uneasiness creates doubt. And doubt quietly eats away at profits.

So think logo first, and your website (and other online assets) after.