In today's digital age, having a robust online presence is crucial for businesses of all sizes and industries. For design professionals such as interior designers, architects, and those in the construction field, a well-designed website can showcase your work, attract new clients, generate leads, manage projects, invoices and overall streamline your business operations. In this guide, we'll walk you through how to set up an Odoo website in just 30 minutes.
What is Odoo ERP?
Odoo ERP is a comprehensive set of tools designed to help manage your business from end to end. Whether you're operating online or offline, Odoo's tools can facilitate customer relationships, vendor relationships, and sales order management, among many other aspects of your business.
Odoo is an open-source platform, meaning its source code is freely installable by anyone with knowledge. It's an extensible set of tools baked into a core software program that allows developers and other tinkerers to easily extend the platform for a fraction of the cost of tools like Microsoft Dynamics and SAP Business Objects.
Who is this for?
Interior designers, architects, and design professionals interested in getting their businesses online.
Managed Services
At Discourse Digital, I can help you not only get online but get setup for success with a comprehensive suite of tools to grow and manage your design business using Odoo. From custom development to managed instances, with nearly 20 years of design industry experience, i can help take the headache out of staying online. Managed Odoo Prices start at just $199/mo and consulting & development at just $150/hr . Schedule a consultation today to see how you can get started at https://discoursedigital.com/schedule-a-consultation
Prerequisites
- An email address (preferably gmail)
- A Google and Google Cloud Account - Learn More
- Enable the Compute API, the website setup process will ask you to enable additional APIs as needed if you are setting up Odoo on Google Cloud.
- Enable a billing account and connect it to your Cloud account - Learn More
- A desire to learn something useful!
Resources and Documentation
- https://bitnami.com/stack/odoo
- https://www.odoo.com/documentation/16.0/
- https://cloud.google.com/
- https://odoo.com
Setting Up a Website with Odoo and Google Cloud
Setting up a website with Odoo and Google Cloud is a simple process that takes about 30 minutes. Here's what we will cover in this tutorial:
Selecting Your Deployment: With Odoo, you have many types of deployment options. With Bitnami, you can deploy to the cloud easily or your local machine. For this tutorial, we'll be deploying on Google Cloud. If you are unfamiliar with Cloud services from Google, Amazon or Microsoft I suggest you consider the Enterprise edition online at odoo.com It is inexpensive, and you get access to all Enterprise apps, and your software is managed by Odoo and receives major version upgrades. The steps in this tutorial are the same starting at Step 4 for any of the deployment options.
Obtaining Log in Credentials: Once your instance has spun up, login credentials will be available on the deployment screen. You can use the admin user and password to log into your instance.
Setting Up SSL Security: Bitnami offers an SSL certificate setup tool called the Bncert tool, which you can access using the SSH command. This tool will walk you through the process of setting up your SSL certificate. Once you click the SSH button on the deployment screen you will get a console window and enter this commands
Adding Apps: Once you're logged in, you'll be presented with the app screen. To get started, choose an app. We recommend installing the sales module first.
Adding the Website Module: Go back to your app screen and select the website module and activate it.
Creating Your Website: Once you install the website module, you'll get a screen where you can select and fill in information about your business for the automated AI to create a web page for you.
Editing Pages: Odoo has a very powerful page editor which we can access just by going to the top right edit menu. From here you can edit the site theme colors, fonts and style as well as easily build pages with drag and drop Blocks.
Adding New Pages: Simply go to the new in the upper right and select page. Type in the page title and we'll leave add to menus so that automatically adds it to the top menu.
Adding a New Blog Article: The blog feature of Odoo is very powerful. In fact, you can set up many blogs by going to configuration, adding new blogs, or renaming those that were set up during initialization. To add a new blog simply click the New in the upper right corner and select Page.
Updating the Currency: The back end to Odoo allows you to update the currency. Go to the settings and then to general settings and type currency into the quick search bar.
Adding New Products: The e-commerce functionality of Odoo is extremely powerful. S see how we can add a design consultation to our eCommerce shop.
Adding the CRM Module: The CRM module of Odoo is very powerful. It allows us to converse with customers, capture leads on our website pages and manage our whole customer relationships. It's one of the best features of Odoo and how it's integrated into a complete ERP system for managing everything for your business including customer sales, vendor payments and much more.
What’s Next?
At this point, you have a website that people can visit and that you can easily update. Next, you will want to configure a few additional settings to get everything working correctly. I also recommend you go to settings and review the available configuration options for each App you installed.
- Email Servers - You will want to setup your email server so Odoo can send and receive mail. This is used extensively throughout the system to send notifications, receive leads, create email marketing campaigns, and create project tasks.
- Accounting Journal - If you plan to use your Odoo to manage sales, ecommerce or other sales related activity such as vendor bills, then you will also need to add the financial journal and install the accounting kit.
- Company Information and Logo - Update your company information under Settings > Users & Companies - Your employee emails should match the domain you setup
- Users and Account Level Access - Add users and set their access permissions.
Be sure to set up your email servers first so that invitation emails to users and notifications get sent correctly.
Conclusion
Odoo is an extremely powerful system that can replace many more expensive apps with something that's consolidated, simple, and can be used across your entire organization. Whether you're one person or 30 people, Odoo has a solution that can work for you at a price point that can meet your budget.
Setting up a website with Odoo and Google Cloud is a simple process that takes about 30 minutes. With its powerful page editor, e-commerce functionality, and CRM module, Odoo provides a comprehensive set of tools to manage your business from end to end. Whether you're an interior designer, architect, or in the construction field, Odoo can help streamline your business operations and boost your online presence.
Remember, setting up a website is just the beginning. There's plenty more to set up in this instance, such as accounting, email servers, and sales orders. But this guide provides a great way to get started with Odoo and establish an online presence. You can worry about setting up all that other stuff later or work with a specialist to have it set up for you.