How to Customize Shopify’s Dawn Theme

June 28, 2022

New to Shopify? Or, maybe you’ve been using this eCommerce platform for years. Regardless of your tenure, you’re probably familiar with Shopify’s arsenal of free and paid themes that allow you to personalize your digital storefront and streamline the user’s experience. 

First impressions are everything, especially when it comes to your online shoppers. After all, there’s a lot of competition out there trying to grab their attention. 

Therefore, if you’re selling products online, it’s important to choose the best theme to fit the style and “tone” of your brand—not to mention include the right features that ensure easy navigation and checkout.

About Shopify’s Dawn Theme

Dawn is just 1 of over 100 free and premium Shopify themes you can choose to create an online store. This theme is recommended for retail and cosmetic brands, as well as home and garden distributors. 

The reason? Though minimal in design, Dawn allows you to brilliantly showcase your products with stunning visuals and easily manage inventory and/or catalog in seconds. This theme is all about simplicity, which means you can instantly add and remove items, photos, videos, testimonials, and more.

Although Dawn is considered more “visual” brand storytelling vs. copy-heavy, you can still create custom pages, including a blog page to support your ongoing content marketing strategy, as well as boost your site’s on-page optimization efforts.

“Dawn is an ultra-lightweight, mobile-first theme that uses atomic components, minimal JavaScript, and an opinionated set of features. It maximizes flexibility for merchants, while minimizing complexity,” (Shopify).

So, now that you know the benefits of using Dawn, you might be wondering why we’re dedicating an entire blog to this free theme. 

Well, in a perfect world, the theme you choose would have every feature, section, and page you could ever dream off. All you would have to do is drag-and-drop items, and your store is ready for business.

But come on! Things change. If you’re in the retail industry, you’re already too familiar with inconvenient shipping delays and supply shortages, so it’s safe to say you’ll find yourself needing to make ongoing adjustments to the design of your theme. And pretty soon, Dawn’s “ease of use” selling point starts to get a little fuzzy. 

Shopify 101: Customizing Sections in Dawn

We’ve got you, though! In fact, we’ve created a helpful step-by-step guide below to teach you how to add a custom section in your Dawn theme, in just a few clicks!

Custom Button Section

  • Add the section called Multicolumn into your page.
  • Remove all but one of the Column blocks from the section.
  • Remove all of the headings and paragraph text within the section, starting from the overall Multicolumn settings then to the individual Column settings.
  • Add a color scheme to the section background (change the color scheme by going to Theme Settings –> Colors)
  • Center the button vertically in the section by adding padding to the bottom.

That’s it! Pretty easy, right? Below, we’ve provided a few more step-by-step instructions on further customizing your Dawn theme in Shopify.

Custom Icon Trio Section

  • Add the section called Multicolumn into your page.
  • Remove the section heading and button text so they do not appear within the section.
  • Change the image width to 1/3 width of the column.
  • Inside the Column block settings, remove the block heading text and add your icon image.

Custom Heading and Subheading for Section (Video Section, as example)

  • Remove the heading text from the Video section and adjust the Top Padding to be 0px.

Add the Rich Text section on top of the Video section

  • Customize the text to any size/width you’d like!

Conclusion

Shopify makes it fast and easy to create your own custom sections, using its “already” built-in features. This allows you more freedom and flexibility to design your storefront with greater personalization than ever. 

Of course, there are many other ways you can customize Shopify, whether you’re using Dawn or a different theme. Check back to our blog page for more step-by-step guides on using Shopify, or contact us to help you design and promote your digital store.

At Brandography, we specialize in eCommerce design and development, as well as Amazon Advertising. To learn more about our capabilities, and how we can help you increase online orders and drive more traffic to your site, contact us for a consultation!

In the meantime, check out this case study to learn how we’ve helped retailers in the past improve ROIs, reduce ad spend, and maximize paid campaigns across multiple channels.   

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