Imagine it’s 1908, and you own Hank’s Barbershop in downtown Mason City. Your physical storefront, hand-painted sign, signature mutton chops, and 10-joke rotation create a recognizable brand identity. You’re Hank, and that’s enough.
Today, Hank’s Barbershop would need more than an offline identity. It would also need a presence across online channels, maintaining consistent branding on social media platforms, TV and radio ads, email marketing materials, and a website.
Thankfully, website branding can help. Here’s what it is, why it matters, and six key website branding elements for your ecommerce site.
What is website branding?
Website branding can mean a strategic process, a design process, or a design system—depending on the context:
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A strategic process. Strategic website branding is the process of creating a distinct brand identity for your website. The result is a brand identity system—a design and messaging framework defining your brand’s voice, values, and visual style.
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A design process. Website branding can also refer to building a branded website. After the strategic process establishes elements like brand colors, the design process applies them to the site.
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A design system. Website branding can also describe the visual, narrative, and structural elements that convey a website’s unique brand identity. A website’s color scheme is an example of website branding.
This article will focus on the third definition: Website branding refers to the elements that express a site’s unique brand identity.
Why does website branding matter for ecommerce?
Strong website branding is critical for all businesses, but particularly ecommerce, where your site may be a customer’s primary—and sometimes only—point of interaction with your brand.
A strong brand identity can increase brand recognition, help you reach your target audience, increase site traffic, and guide potential customers toward conversion. In the long term, it can also cultivate brand loyalty.
6 key elements of website branding
Award-winning web design agency and Shopify partner Mote brings more than a decade of expertise crafting brand experiences for online shoppers. Here’s what lead software engineer Rembrant Van der Mijnsbrugge and creative director Sara Mote say about best practices for a standout branded site:
1. Typography
Typography deals with typeface (e.g., Calibri) and font (e.g. Calibri light italic 12 point). Rembrant recommends starting your website branding conversations here.
“We don’t want to look generic, not even from the first day, and the way that we go about that is that we start with a great font,” he says. “Good typography is the foundation of all the design we do at Mote.”
Sara adds, "Every single font has its own story and inspiration. It’s the subtle nuances within the letterforms that give a distinctive voice and tone that strengthen a brand’s identity.”
She also advises business owners to consider how text will be used. A typeface with more flourish and decoration is appropriate for headlines and large display text, but call-to-action buttons and product descriptions require easy-to-read choices that match size, weight, and line length to context.
“Good typography guides the reader’s eyes through the text, emphasizing important information and enhancing comprehension,” Sara says.
Sara and Rembrant recommend the free Shopify font Basic Commercial or premium fonts from an independent foundry like Klim Type Foundry.
2. Color palette
Your website’s color palette—or color scheme—is a selection of three to five colors that apply to every element on your site, including fonts, buttons, backgrounds, icons, and website graphics.
Sara and Rembrant recommend high-contrast brand colors for legibility. Even choosing a subtle shade like off-white instead of pure white for your product backgrounds can be a way to incorporate your brand identity.
“Is it more on the gray-blue side? Is it more on the cream side that has warmth? Make sure it’s something that complements your brand,” Rembrant says. “There’s a lot of opportunity there for it to be a recognizable element.”
Strong website branding is also consistent, so draw from one color palette for your entire site and choose brand colors consistent with your broader brand identity.
Sara advises business owners to remember photo backgrounds and packaging: “I think the important conversation here is that color is a way to differentiate your brand, so from the core palette of the website, do typography, backgrounds, packaging, and photography.”
3. Visual assets
Visual website content includes photos, videos, and website graphics—all key to a strong brand identity.
“Prioritizing contrast and legibility often results in a site that plays it a little bit safer when it comes to the core color palette,” Sara says. “And so it becomes even more important to use photography to inject brand personality.”
Your asset style depends on your brand’s personality, industry, and target audience. A futuristic luxury fashion brand might use highly stylized product photography and abstract design elements, while a science-based supplement company could lean on clean graphics inspired by research publications.
4. Layout
Website layout is the placement of visual elements on your site. An effective ecommerce store layout expresses your brand identity, helps website visitors navigate your site, and encourages potential customers to convert.
Sara and Rembrant recommend Shopify Themes for ecommerce-friendly site layouts that allow for a distinctive brand identity.
Sara says, “You could set up [the same theme] in an unlimited amount of ways, and it’s going to look totally different brand to brand.”
“If you are not sure where to begin in the Shopify Theme Store,” Rembrant adds, “the standard Dawn theme is incredibly performative.”
Themes govern the appearance of elements across your site, so they help maintain consistent branding. After choosing your font colors, logo, and other options, incorporate branding elements from the Branding panel in the Admin section. You can customize your logo, typography, and layout details, like horizontal and vertical spacing.
5. Site structure
Website structure is how pages and content categories are connected and arranged. It’s an essential part of website branding because it affects how visitors and search engines interact with your website content.
An effective ecommerce website structure funnels users toward conversion and offers deeper brand engagement.
“The challenge of designing ecommerce is that solutions often require a delicate balance,” Sara says. “How can we craft something that is both beautiful and strategic?” Prominently displayed navigation bars and buttons can help.
“If someone’s on a mission,” she continues, “make it as easy as possible for them to find the product they’re looking for through navigation, through filters, through search.” She recommends using common site entry points—like homepages and landing pages—to tell a compelling brand story.
“There’s the romancing of sale as well,” she adds. “If someone lands on your homepage and scrolls down, they have a clear idea of who you are and what you offer, and they feel inspired to not only stay on the site but to go deeper.”
6. Written content
Strong website content and copy work alongside your site’s visual identity to create a distinctive, cohesive brand voice. Effective content explains how your business solves problems and helps customers get to know your values.
It’s also ideal for sharing your brand story, which weaves past milestones into your current identity, creating deeper connections with your audience. For example, your brand’s story might tell site visitors why you started your business and explain how that informs your commitment to customers.
“A website is definitely an opportunity to invite others to connect with your brand or company on a deeper level, one that feels really personal and emotional rather than purely transactional,” says Sara, who recommends a content strategy that paces site visitors through your brand story.
“Giving visitors all the information at one time on one page can just be too much,” she adds. “It’s about weaving a story of the brand throughout the site, ensuring that when someone lands on your homepage, they have a clear sense of your brand and your product offerings, and then as they journey through the site, you offer more detail.”
Effective ecommerce website branding example
Balancing brand personality with usability is one of the main challenges of ecommerce branding website design. A good ecommerce site is immersive and experiential and represents your brand authentically, but, as Sara explains, "the design also shows restraint. It needs to function; it needs to transact.”
Los Angeles–based jewelry designer Jacquie Aiche’s site is an example of an effective balance between form and function. Its clean layout maximizes usability, and the warm neutral color palette incorporates a high-contrast off-black for easy-to-read text.
It also embraces traditional element placement. “We have the navigation links on the left-hand side, the logo in the center, and tools such as search, links to your account, and the [shopping cart icon] in the upper right-hand corner," Sara says. “Things are in their expected place.”
Jacquie Aiche’s site expresses the company’s unique brand personality through distinctive video and photo assets. It uses a looping video of a brand ambassador wearing pieces from the brand’s jewelry collections as a hero image, and homepage images visible on scroll use the same style. The brand refreshes the imagery on the homepage every few months, but keeps the same visual style.

“The imagery and the video really gives you more of the unique brand perspective and personality,” Sara says. “When you go into a unique collection, the actual product photography is more standardized, but then there’s a lot of color and texture in the site through the styling of the lifestyle imagery which just breathes life into the experience.”
Mote designed a navigation experience that balances efficiency and discovery. The navigation bar clearly showcases main categories while offering the flexibility to include text-based or image-based links. For instance, when a visitor clicks “Jewelry,” the drop-down menu shows categories, gemstones, and collections on the left and a prominent branded lifestyle image on the right.
Sara says, “With this approach, if someone is on a mission and [they want to buy] a gemstone necklace, they can open the menu and it’s one click to go to a gemstone necklace collection. If they want to be romanced a little bit, there’s edited curation. You have both approaches for navigating through a website.”
Website branding FAQ
What is branding on websites?
Website branding refers to the stylistic choices through which a website expresses a business’s unique brand identity. Website branding examples include a site’s logo, color palette, visual assets, brand voice and tone, and the layout and structural choices that help it tell your brand story.
Do web designers do branding?
Web designers aren’t brand strategists; they’re experts in expressing brand identity through site design. They don’t develop a brand for your company but can use your existing brand guidelines to build a website that maintains consistency with your larger brand identity.
How do I brand my website?
Website branding involves creating website assets, layouts, and structures that express your brand image and maintain consistency with your larger brand identity. Here are six key elements:
1. Typography
2. Color palette
3. Visual assets
4. Layout
5. Site structure
6. Written content