Duration: 25:44
PART 1 — Analytical Summary 💼
Title: Best practices to use the Website Builder like a professional designer
Speaker: Amandine, Web Designer at Odoo
Context: A hands-on design session showing how to build a beautiful, usable site with the Odoo Website Builder, with a focus on balancing UX and UI — and showcasing several new features in v19. Why it matters: Many sites look good but fail on usability (the speaker opens with a French comedy’s three-legged-chair gag to illustrate this). This talk distills practical methods to avoid that trap — from wireframing to theme setup — and demonstrates precisely how to execute them inside Odoo. 🚀
Amandine frames the journey in two parts. First, UX (User Experience): how it feels, how easy it is, and how useful it is. She recommends starting with a wireframe — a “blueprint” for content hierarchy, features, and expected behaviors — before touching visuals. Second, UI (User Interface): how it looks, how elements are arranged, and how people interact (buttons, hover states, animations). She underscores the fundamentals of clean design: consistent colors, thoughtful typography, purposeful animation, high-quality images, and generous whitespace.
The heart of the session is a live walkthrough of designing an e‑commerce homepage in Odoo Website Builder. She begins in the Theme tab — where changing colors, fonts, and button styles instantly propagates across the site. Using a prebuilt mood board, she copies hex codes into Odoo’s palettes and uploads Google Fonts (or custom fonts) for headings and paragraphs. Rounded buttons and cohesive typography quickly shape a distinct brand tone. 🧠
Then comes the design lift that images provide. She swaps banner and section visuals using built‑in access to free image libraries and shows a new v19 category showcase block that dynamically reflects eCommerce categories. When contrast issues appear, she applies color filters and selects from Odoo’s auto‑generated five color palettes to improve readability. For more control, she switches blocks to grid mode, gaining flexible, designer‑level layout options. She also leverages v19’s inline text toolbar to edit headings in place. To create contemporary impact, she introduces oversized type (e.g., 100px bold display), precisely aligns elements, fine‑tunes image focal points, and sets the header to sit “over content” for a premium hero feel. ⚙️
The session continues with dynamic content and new v19 UI components. The product carousel now supports single‑item scrolling, full‑width containers, new card designs, adjustable gaps/roundness, and image ratio controls. A new announcement scroll block works like a marquee for brand messages (direction, speed, hover behavior, font size are configurable). Across sections, she keeps reinforcing consistency: reusing typographic scales, managing spacing, ensuring contrast, and applying subtle on‑appearance animations (e.g., slide‑in with tuned intensity). The result is a site that looks crafted and remains highly usable.
Q&A rounds out practical concerns. For horizontal category listings that get crowded, v19 introduces alternative designs (e.g., thumbnails and dots/pagination). For content reuse, you can now save any page as a template and start new pages from it. On category‑specific product listing styles, she points to specialized eCommerce configuration and notes new filter placement options (including offscreen sidebar). Finally, mega menus can be created in the site menu editor, with ready‑made templates and dynamic category support. 💬
Impact & takeaways: With Odoo Website Builder, brand fundamentals become systemic — color and type updates cascade globally, imagery is first‑class, and layout power scales from simple drag‑and‑drop to grid‑level precision. v19 adds meaningful design agility (inline text editing, improved carousels, announcement scrolling, richer category blocks, menu templates, and filtering options). The overarching lesson is simple: start with wireframes for UX clarity, then apply theme‑driven UI for consistency. The platform bridges the gap between designer intent and practical execution, making professional results achievable without heavy custom code. ✅
PART 2 — Viewpoint: Odoo Perspective
Disclaimer: AI-generated creative perspective inspired by Odoo’s vision.
Great design should feel obvious because everything unnecessary has been removed. What I love in this demo is how a few decisions in the Theme — color, typography, spacing — flow everywhere. When integration is done right, you spend your time on experience, not on repetition.
Our goal with v19 is to turn design into a system anyone can trust. Grid mode, dynamic blocks, and inline editing are not “features,” they are ways to keep teams focused on clarity, usability, and community‑shared best practices — so every Odoo website can be both beautiful and efficient.
PART 3 — Viewpoint: Competitors (SAP / Microsoft / Others)
Disclaimer: AI-generated fictional commentary. Not an official corporate statement.
Odoo’s website builder continues to improve, especially in UX tooling and speed-to-value. For SMBs and mid‑market teams, the combination of theme‑level controls, dynamic eCommerce blocks, and grid flexibility is compelling. The v19 enhancements reduce time from concept to production and keep branding consistent.
At enterprise scale, questions remain around governance, compliance, and multi‑brand complexity: role‑based design permissions, accessibility auditing, localization at volume, performance under heavy catalogs, and content lifecycle controls. This is where SAP, Microsoft, and other suites differentiate with enterprise content workflows, policy enforcement, and integration to broader compliance tooling. Still, Odoo’s UX simplicity is a real advantage — especially for organizations prioritizing agility and unified UX across apps.
PART 4 — Blog Footer Disclaimer
Disclaimer: This article contains AI-generated summaries and fictionalized commentaries for illustrative purposes. Viewpoints labeled as "Odoo Perspective" or "Competitors" are simulated and do not represent any real statements or positions. All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.