Short answer: no, but it helps. Longer answer: it depends on how far off your brand actually is from being decided.

If you've got an existing logo, colours and a rough sense of how your business should look and sound, we can get straight into the website. If you're starting from nothing - a brand-new business, or one that's never actually had a proper identity - building the site first usually means building it twice, once now and once again after the branding catches up.

We've done both. Oilhub and Ladders Direct both started as ideas without an existing brand at all - we built the name, the logo and identity from scratch, then the website sat on top of a foundation that was already settled. Other clients come to us with a strong existing brand and just need the website to catch up to it.

The middle ground - and where most businesses actually sit - is having something rough: a logo you're not fully sold on, colours you picked without much thought. In that case, we'll usually recommend locking in the basics first - a proper logo file, a couple of brand colours, maybe a font - before the site build starts. It's a smaller job than a full rebrand, and it means the site gets built on something that'll still make sense in two years, not something you'll want to redo the moment it's live.

If you're not sure which camp you're in, that's a completely normal thing to ask us before either project starts.