Fashionable productiveness device Notion has lengthy allowed its customers to make any of their pages public. Now, the corporate is increasing on this with the launch of Notion Websites, which provides a number of new options to its present publishing instruments. For probably the most half, these are fairly easy, however collectively, they do make for a extra polished publishing expertise.
A whole lot of content-centric work already occurs in Notion, be that organizing publishing calendars or really engaged on paperwork. Through the years, Notion customers discovered all types of the way to show their pages into web sites — and a few startups had been even based solely on that concept. On condition that there’s a transparent demand, it is sensible then for the corporate to lean into publishing that work immediately.
“One of the best features of Notion has always been that with a single click, you can turn a Notion page into a publicly facing website,” Notion product lead Matt Piccolella advised me forward of as we speak’s launch. “The problem with these pages is that they’ve always been missing many of the bells and whistles that you might expect to see on a website.”
Notion Websites provides a few of these bells and whistles. Particularly, meaning the flexibility to do issues like customizing favicons and constructing navigation bars with hyperlinks, in addition to utilizing breadcrumb navigation. These Notion Websites can now additionally simply be revealed underneath customized domains and, for higher visibility and analytics, there are additionally fundamental search engine optimization options (principally title and outline) in addition to a Google Analytics integration. Notion customers can now additionally customise their share previews to outline how a website is represented on social media. And for locating data on the websites themselves, Notion has added a search characteristic.
Like earlier than, the thought right here is to assist customers publish any Notion web page they might have been engaged on internally after which make these publicly accessible. That additionally implies that just about each present Notion characteristic will seem on the general public Notion Web site, too.
One factor the crew has very particularly stayed away from, although, is the flexibility to customise websites intimately. There’s a darkish and lightweight mode, identical to in Notion itself, however that’s about it. Over time, Piccolella mentioned, the crew plans so as to add extra visible theming choices. The mission right here, Piccolella mentioned, is to make this the “simplest way to publish a beautiful website” — meaning loads of selection for the person.
“I think one of the benefits of Notion is that you get that kind of Notion look and feel, which is kind of effortlessly beautiful,” he mentioned. “Fonts are going to look really nice and the colors are going to look really nice, without having to comb through tons of different visual styling and things like that. It’s actually kind of the visual minimalism that we like.”
Like seemingly each firm, Notion can also be desirous about the way it can add AI performance to assist customers construct their Notion Websites but in addition to make AI options accessible to their customers. Piccolella wasn’t but prepared to enter particulars about what that may appear to be, although.
