I became a Notion fan at the start of this year, it is now my go to app for productivity and most of my digital life and data is organized within the app.
I am creating a new note or project within the app when I think of something I might want to create during this month or year.
Notion pages are very flexible while using basic building blocks like header, lists, links. It makes it possible to build a page custom for you while still having a standard set making it easier for storing and retrieving data for them.
One very important feature I like is having relational databases within a page when you need to structure data fast or track progress.
For exemple I use it now to manually track my progress on Inleo. A good thing about database is that you can have multiple views of the data while not changing the data itself, you can decide to hide or filter the database only for a single page while not destroying the data itself.
Creating a small website or make a page accessible.
With Notion you, since all page are basically webpage that are rendered on a browser, you can share those page with other people via a link or even link it with a custom domain which I did when I run my test run for my website walterjay.fr which is my first attempt in using a Notion page as the front-end for me. The idea at the start was to create a kind of link-tree for people that I came in contact with, they could go to one place and find what I was offering.
I still need to spend some time in creating my website in order to make it useful for me, I did create like to a shop I will publish with gumroad where I intent to sell digital products at some point. My idea was to have a go to place for people that wanted to work with me.
I also want to use it to bring people (affiliate) to different product I am using like inleo.io
This is a quick view of what can be achieve in a very reasonable amount of time with Notion. I think this could be a business opportunity, selling custom made page or Notion template for people that want a quick site setup where they are able to easily change the text. This could compete with Wordpress for simple website for non technical people because changing the text live is a breeze.
Until today I had to use a separate third party in order to do the redirection from my Notion url which is using their domain, to a custom one that I bought. This is a service I was paying for like $15 or so per month but now their might be a way to do that natively with Notion.
Notion sites within the App
If you want one website you can get it for free but with a .notion site, for custom domains you will have to buy a Notion Plan then pay extra per domain for the connection cost. Although it could be a bit more expensive then the cheapest external service, you do get the added feature of Notion Plus or Business.
I think it could be good to let people have the option to just by one custom domain connection even for free users as that would still bring revenue but I can understand Notion's position. Their goal is to have more happy paid customers and increase revenue, I think this will happen if they provide a reliable service.
For Europe price is 114€ billed annually or 11,50 per month and you have to add the cost of a custom domain, I will update this post later or create a new one once I have gone through with doing the change for my site.
Integrated Google analytics
You can now simply add your Id for analytics and it should work just like that.
Conclusion
I will need a bit of time to change to this new setup as the top menu needs to be rebuild within Notion as this was a feature from my third party provider that would add things like the menu on top of the Notion page.
I will also need to change some settings within my DNS and it might take time to propagate so it is still possible that people will see the old site for a while.
If it works the way I want then I will resign my subscription to the other party and use it natively on Notion, this is also a nice update not to have to rely on external service. Notion is now a big company and I have more trust in them for apps that interact with their product.
if you need help starting your Notion journey, you can contact me in the comments, I would be happy to work with you.
