Congratulations on taking the leap and deciding to build your own website!
Whether you're a beginner or a pro, we have everything you need to plan, create, publish and grow your site, blog or online store.
This Planner will help you to think about your website and provide tips and ideas to inspire you. There are examples and explanations to guide you through the process of creating a top-notch, high quality site that meets all your needs.
The whole process may take a few hours, some discussions with your colleagues and several cups of coffee to go through. But don't worry, you can return to this tool at any time.
We wish you a fun time!
For the Odoo Team,Fabien Pinckaers, Founder
Being clear on why you're creating your site and your goals is an essential first step to ensure your content and structure meet business objectives.
Visitors might not be interested in your products or services when they come to your site. They could want to learn something, improve their life, grow their business, find out more about you, etc. What great content can you offer your visitors? Why should they stay on your website?
It's often much easier not to start with a blank page. Take a look at your competitors
and similar companies around the world. They probably have the same objectives and
visitors that you do. How did they transform that into a website?
Try to find 3 websites that have remarkable characteristics:
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Find 3 websites that you like and write down what you like about them.
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#1
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#2
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#3
After working on this step, you may want to go back and refine your objectives or modify your visitors interests. Those 3 first steps are essentially linked, and the more time your spend on polishing them, the better your website will be!
The theme you choose sets the tone for the overall look and feel of your site design.
Your theme selection will define:
It's difficult to change your theme after creating your website, so take the time to look at all the themes, and be sure that you're happy with your choice!
View our themes selectionUse the Customize menu to change the look of your theme:
You can also use the integrated HTML Editor(from the Customize menu) to modify the code directly.
We can create a customized theme for you with your company colors, logo and images from your library.
Before starting to work on your website, make sure you have all the right applications installed. It will be much easier for you to organize and create your content if you have all the options activated from the start.
Activate now the optional modules you'll need:
Your homepage is the most important page of your website. This is where visitors get their first impressions of you. An excellent homepage will encourage them to stay on your site, guide them towards your content, reinforce your company's branding and more.
Here are some pointers to help you get started.
Find a catchy headline
Make sure anyone who visits your site understands what it’s about without having to do a lot of reading.
To do that, the visible section of your homepage (above the fold) needs to be simple and straightforward. For example, use pictures of your work, screenshots of your app, a short and catchy hook.
The Banner or Big Picture building blocks are good choices for that.
Encourage to action
Add one, and only one, call-to-action on your homepage. Your homepage is
the page that gets the most visitors.
It's good practice to try to engage with your visitors on the homepage:
Contact Us, Subscribe to Get More Information, Check the Catalog, etc.
Use the Newsletter subscription (from mass mailing application) or the Big button building block for that.
Add features and content
You can put more content in the intermediate section of your homepage (one
or two scrolls down from the visible section), but try to keep your
paragraphs easy to read and avoid 'walls of text'.
For example, use photos to help break up large areas of text by altering Text-Image and Image-Text blocks. Or if you prefer to use icons, use the Features or Feature Grid blocks.
Display social proof
Below your main banner or call-to-action, it's a good practice to put
social proofs about your products or services; customer quotes, videos,
photos of your products in actions, twitter quotes, etc.
You have a lot of choices for that: the References, Quotes Slider, Twitter Scroller,...
Creating your main menu is an important and difficult stage in building your website.
It needs to be organized, so that your visitors can see all the main content you offer at a glance.
It needs to be clear, so that when they click on an item, they get the content they expected.
In fact, you need to build your navigation menu for your visitors and not for your own purposes or objectives.
The best and simplest way to start is to create a few pages and link them directly from the main menu. Just try not to go over 6 items, otherwise your main menu will be difficult to use.
As you add more pages to your website, you main menu will begin to feel overcrowded. You can regroup similar pages into a sub-menu, so they will appear under a unique drop-down menu.
Finally don't try to make all your content accessible from the main menu or the footer. Indeed, a page can also be accessible through a direct link or button, from any other page of your website.
Example of Good Menu
With that in mind, try to define the structure of your main menu:
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1. Your main menu items and 2. Your secondary menu items (optional):
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#1
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#2
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#3
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#4
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#5
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#6
A footer, as its name implies, is located at the very bottom of your website. Because of that, your visitors won't see it immediately so it's very useful for linking pages you don't want in your main menu e.g. social media, terms and conditions, privacy terms, etc.
If you have a lot of pages in your website, you can create a small top-menu to focus on the main six pages and make all secondary pages accessible from a footer. You can have a look at the Odoo.com website, it's a great example of this type of structure.
Example of Good Footer
Now try to write down you footer structure:
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3. Your footer titles and 4. Your footer links:
- #1
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#2
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#3
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#4
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#5
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#6
You can set Odoo on a custom domain name (e.g. yourcompany.com) for both the website and your emails. Because your website address is as important to your branding as the name of your business or organization, you’ll want to put some thought into changing it for a proper domain, or change it to one you already own.
Launching your website is an important step.
Here is a checklist of actions to help you launch a new website efficiently:
Initial Teaser
Before launching to the masses, it's good practice to tease around 100 of
your contacts. Start with your friends, colleagues and family. Whether or
not they're interested in your area of business, they will be ready to help
you with feedback if you engage in a personal discussion with them.
Explain to them why you launched your new website and ask them for their views on it. Avoid using a mass survey, it's a lot more efficient to have personal discussions with everyone. If you efficiently engage them in the reviewing process, they will even help you promote your website when it's ready for the big launch.
To get an external assessment of your website, you can also submit it to peek.usertesting.com for a free evaluation of the usability of your homepage.
The big launch
Be announced on the Odoo Twitter account
We like to hear from people using Odoo to build their website. Tweet us
@odoo a reference to your new website. We will retweet it (we have 30,000 followers) and feature it in our different communications.
Once you’ve launched your website, it’s time to grow your traffic.
You can do this by optimizing your referencing by search engines like Google: it's called SEO. This is the process of increasing the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's natural and unpaid ("organic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
You can also place online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries: this is called SEA.
Optimize your content
Writing content that includes frequently searched-for keywords and phrases
tends to increase traffic to your website.
With Odoo, you can automatically check which keywords are ranked best for a specific query, then add them in the content of your page.
To do that, simply use the Promote menu on each page of your website.
Add relevant keywords
Adding relevant keywords to a web page's meta data, including the title tag
and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search
listings, also increasing your traffic.
For example, you'll want your company name, your country/city and a few words describing your business in your homepage title so that potential customers near your location will find your website easily. WIth Odoo, this can be done easily by using the Promote menu.
Reference your images...
If you are an artist or a photographer, you can potentially bring in a lot
of visitors by referencing your images so they are displayed in image
search engines, like Google Images. To do that, simply add an 'Alt text'
containing descriptions and keywords for relevant pictures.
... and your location too!
Millions of people use Google Maps everyday. Whether you are a restaurant
or a huge business, you have no excuse not to register your location in
Google Business.
Start a blog
Google loves websites which are updated often or ones where new content is
added regularly. This is why starting a blog is an excellent way of
improving your search ranking. If you have the time and dedication to write
good articles, check out our blog application to get started.
Be linked by trusted websites
The more sites that link to your own site, the more Google trusts your site
to be worthwhile:
Use Google Webmaster
This tool will help you understand your search traffic and learn how users
are finding your site and make optimizations to help Google better
understand and represent your site.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Advertise to get the first visitors
If you have a small budget to allocate to advertising (around $100), you
should start a Google Adwords campaign.
Start by looking how often people search phrases related to your business, how competitive the keywords are in AdWords, and how much it’ll cost to advertise on each keyword. All of this information will help you determine which keywords you want to use in your first campaign. Use Google Adword to do that (make sure the Advanced Options are set to your country and language).
There are three questions you should ask before deciding whether or not to advertise on a particular keyword:
A/B testing is the process of testing two versions of a page to see which one performs better in reaching your business objectives. For example, imagine you have an existing page (A) where you ask your customers to subscribe to your mailing list. You create a variation (B) of this page with a slightly different subscription message. Then your randomly display this page to half the visitors of your website, and after a while, you analyze the subscription statistics and see that page B performs 10% better than page A. Of course, you now decide to make B your new current page!
Here is a basic guide for your first A/B testing:
1. Define what to test
Your choice of what to test will obviously depend on your goals, but should
always be linked to one of your business objectives (don't spend energy
improving something that brings you no ROI). Then, find the best page to
test and the variation you think will bring the best results.Here are a
few examples of good testing variables:
2. Create the page variation
Once you're clear on the measurable objective, the page and the variable
you want to test, duplicate the page in Odoo using the 'Versions'
menu and apply the modification you decided.
3. Configure a Google Analytics account
This is necessary in order to record the statistics of your test.
- Before starting, create a Google Analytics account if you don't have one yet.
- Then, go to Google's developer console and connect with the Google account you created
- Create a new project (this may take some time)
- In the left-side menu of the project, go to APIs and auth > APIs and activate Analytics API by clicking on the Off button.
- Still in the left-side menu, go to APIs and auth > Credentials and click on 'Create New Client ID'
- In the pop-up window, simply enter your domain name in the first textbox (the second will complete automatically)
- Then, copy the Client ID and Client Secret codes and paste them in Odoo's Google Analytics settings
4. Create your campaign in Google Analytics
Simply follow the wizard by creating a new experiment in the Behavior >
Experiments menu of Google Analytics.
To learn more, take a look at their online help.
Good practices |
Bad practices |
|---|---|
| Know how long to run a test before giving up. Giving up too early can cost you because you may have gotten meaningful results had you waited a little longer. Giving up too late isn’t good either, because poorly performing variations could cost you conversions and sales. |
Don't test versions at different time periods. If you test one version one week and the second the next, your results won't be accurate, or worse, wrong! |
| Do many A/B tests. Chances are, your first A/B test will turn out a lemon. But don’t despair. An A/B test can have only three outcomes: no result, a negative result or a positive result. The key to optimizing conversion rates is to do a ton of A/B tests, so that all positive results add up to a huge boost to your sales and achieved goals. |
Don’t conclude too early. Wait for your test results to be significant. Take a look at the statistical confidence in Google Analytics, it should be at least 95%. |
| Don’t surprise regular visitors. If you are testing a core part of your website, include only new visitors in the test. You want to avoid shocking regular visitors, especially because the variations may not ultimately be implemented. |
Translating your website into other languages is the best way to broaden its audience. In Odoo, you can either manually translate your pages as they are displayed, use an automatic machine translation service for free or pay professional translators to do it for you.
1. Add your desired languages
Use the link in the footer of your website (when logged in) to add
languages from the available list. Also, you can change the
default language in Settings > Website
2. Setup Gengo
Free, but quality may vary
Pay for professionnal quality
A good way to start is to use machine translation then apply corrections yourself.
Your website is an important part of your online business strategy, but it shouldn't be the only one. There are so many ways to communicate with your customers, visitors and prospects that it's sometimes difficult to know what to put your energy into. Here is some advice on what to focus on next.
Use contact forms:
Organize physical events
Create an online Q&A
Discuss live
Congratulations, you're done !
We hope this planner helped you to create your website.
Don't hesitate to
send us an email to describe
your experience or to suggest improvements !
- The Odoo Team
