Notion-Powered Websites

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I’m a big fan of Notion, as you likely know from previous coverage and recent video. It’s always interesting to see what other people do with Notion, and even how Notion uses Notion.

I’d say most usage of Notion is private and internal, but any page on Notion can be totally public with the flip of a switch. We do that with some stuff like our post ideas page and here’s a simple camping checklist I made for myself.

That’s pretty rad. You could use that for lots of business-things you might otherwise literally build a website to do. Maybe a public product roadmap, a job posting, a press release an announcement…

But it’s not quite a website. You don’t get a custom domain name. You don’t have any analytics on it. You’re limited by the exact feature set of Notion.

People have been trying to extract the data out of Notion and essentially use it as a CMS for a while now…

• Krzysztof Kowalczyk: Powering a blog with Notion and Netlify
• Ben Borgers: How to use Notion as your blog’s CMS
• Tony Faieta: How I Use Notion As My CMS For My Gatsby Site

But all those ways are, ya know, a decent amount of effort.

Stephen Ou recently showed me a pretty cool idea he has called Fruition. It’s entirely free, and also a bit of effort to set up, but once you’re done, you have your own domain name that hosts a Notion page and gives you some control over it (like putting in fonts and scripts and such).

It’s very clever in that it uses Cloudflare Workers to do all the heavy lifting.

This is probably the easiest-to-manage website ever. Just open Notion, change stuff, done.

Stephen admits Fruition is somewhat complex to set up. If you’re looking for something easier and perhaps more flexible, check out Super.

I would note that none of these things are official Notion products or affiliates of it in any way. Honestly, they all make me a little nervous in that they could break if Notion ever decides they don’t care for the product to be used this way. I also feel like Notion has been saying an API is something they’d like to offer for a while. That will be the real answer to all this and there will be a proliferation of third-party products once we have it.

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