Why we code by hand in the Odoo website module.

When you talk about an Odoo website, most people think of the built-in visual builder. You drag in blocks, change the colours and publish. It's fast, it's included and it looks good at first glance. For 60% of projects, it's the right answer. But for the remaining 40%, it's exactly what turns a promising website into a generic one. Here's why, at WebNest, we chose the other path for you.

The Odoo builder has real strengths.

Let's be honest. Odoo's website builder is probably one of the best in the ERP market. It's integrated with the rest of the suite and knows your products, your customers and your orders. It lets you put a page together in 20 minutes. For a small business that's just starting out, simply wants an online presence and has neither the budget nor the appetite to spend hours on design, it's a respectable answer.

And it has one asset few people appreciate: it talks directly to your back office. When a product's price changes, your site follows. When stock drops to zero, the “Add to basket” button disappears. That native integration is why Odoo beats WordPress on serious e-commerce projects.

Where it falls short.

The builder is designed so that anyone can use it. And that's precisely its problem. To achieve that goal, Odoo made choices: predefined blocks, a limited set of fonts, animations from a catalogue. You can't really step outside the box.

In practice: if you want an asymmetric layout, a truly custom mega menu, a specific scroll animation, a Fraunces variable font tuned to a tenth of a point, or a hover state that isn't just opacity 0.8, you can't. Unless you start hacking. And hacking a system that wasn't designed for it creates invisible technical debt for your business that resurfaces six months later.

A site made with the builder is a size M suit. It fits everyone. It fits nobody perfectly.

WebNest manifesto

What hand coding changes.

Coding by hand doesn't mean starting from scratch. You keep the Odoo ecosystem: the back office, the e-commerce modules, multilingual support, the basket, the checkout. Everything that works for you by default keeps working. What we do is work on the presentation layer. The result:

Reference: QWeb is Odoo's official templating engine, used to generate the frontend and PDF reports from XML. Documentation: Odoo, QWeb Templates, accessed in August 2026.

• A real visual identity. The colours are yours, the typography is deliberate, the spacing is calculated. Nothing is left “by default”.
• Performance under control. No unnecessary scripts loading in cascade. We know exactly what happens with every request.
• Readable maintenance. Six months later, another developer can pick up the code and understand what we did.
• Genuine scalability. When you want to add a feature, we add it. We don't wait for Odoo to release a new snippet before we can help you.

It's not for everyone.

Coding by hand costs more. It's simple maths: writing takes longer than dragging and dropping. Our minimum fee is €1,000 excl. VAT per project, and a serious brochure website typically costs between €4,000 and €8,000. If your budget is lower, the builder is a more sensible answer. We'd rather tell you that honestly than take on a project we can't do well.

Coding by hand also requires more commitment on your part. We need a precise brief, a sitemap and clear ideas about the features. We don't deliver a pre-filled theme: we build it with you. If you have neither the time nor the inclination for that collaboration, the builder is once again the better fit.

How we actually do it.

We work directly in your Odoo instance. No duplicate, no parallel test environment that has to be migrated afterwards. We create custom QWeb templates (like the one for this page, as it happens), write semantic HTML, put the CSS in a style block and attach vanilla JavaScript where needed. No bloated jQuery, no framework that has to be updated every six months.

A typical QWeb template

// page_about.xml
<template id="about_page">
  <t t-call="website.layout">
    <section class="wn-about">
      <!-- HTML written line by line -->
      <div class="wn-about-h1">Welcome.</div>
    </section>
    <style>
      .wn-about { padding: 120px 32px; }
      .wn-about-h1 { font-family: 'Fraunces'; }
    </style>
  </t>
</template>

It's readable. It can be version-controlled. Any front-end developer who can read HTML can modify it. No magic, no black box. If you switch agencies in two years, the new team opens the code and understands what we did within 10 minutes. That's real freedom.

What we stand for.

Coding by hand is a choice for quality. It's also a choice for honesty. You know where your money goes. Not into a software vendor's margin. Not into a hidden licence. Into the time we spend writing your site, line by line, with performance and accessibility in mind, and with an eye on how it will hold up in two years when your goals have moved on.

We code by hand because it's the only way to deliver a site that truly reflects you, that doesn't look like 200 other Odoo sites and that doesn't depend on the whims of a marketplace theme. It's our signature, and our promise: Goodbye Powered by Odoo.

Looking for a hand-coded Odoo website? That's the job of our Odoo agency.