Customers are coming to your site to get information or to purchase a product. They are not interested in the aesthetics of your site. You still need to be interested in the look of your site since it is your company online. Branding is the visual imagery you apply to your logo, brochures, products, and packaging. Branding visually defines you. Your web site should reflect your current branding. McDonald's brand is the golden arches, Coca Cola's brand is the white swirl on the red background. You don't need to read the label to know that a product came from McDonald's or Coca Cola; all you need to see is their brand image. To create a successful branding campaign, you need to apply your brand (visual image) to all visual aspects of your products, including your web site.

To create a successful web site, use your branding images as the basis for your web design. Incorporate your current branding elements, including color scheme, into the design and layout of your web site. If your corporate colors are teal and yellow, use teal and yellow on your web site. Keep the visuals of your online shopping site and online purchasing site consistent with each other. Customers get confused if the design elements change; they don't know where they are and may not trust the service if the site physically changes when they move from online shopping to online purchasing.

Spend the time up front laying out your site for easy navigation. A poorly laid out site will confuse visitors. If it takes visitors more than three clicks to get to the information they need, or if it takes a page longer than 20 seconds to download, the visitor is likely to leave your site. Currently, most successful sites are using Generation 3 layout, which are top and side navigation bars to simplify information access. They use a top navigation bar for high level access to subjects, e.g. Products, Support, Online- Purchasing, Corporate Information, and Site Maps.

Larger companies or companies with diverse product lines will use the top of the page navigation to provide visitors with easy access to each of their product. On the side of the page, the navigation bar is used to access second level subjects. If a visitor chooses "Products" from the top of the page, the side navigation will display all the names of the company's products. A visitor can then click on the name of the product in which they are interested to get to the online shopping site dedicated to that product. The side navigation bar will then be updated with the information specific to that product line. The center of the page is available to display information on the product or subject. The top navigation should remain constant throughout the web site. The side navigation should change based on where the visitor is in the web site. This way, the visitor can easily access sub-topics from the side bar navigation and quickly move to major subjects via the top navigation.