I use Notion as my second brain, and it helps me organize my life, from reflecting and setting intention with daily journal entries to taking meeting notes and tracking next steps. But one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about it recently is using it to host my personal website, ronforbes.com.
What Makes Notion So Great?
Notion combines three great features in my mind:
- It’s a great document editor. It has a very simplified interface and provides a ton of power by organizing content around blocks. It recognizes markdown shortcuts (# for heading 1, [] for to-do’s, > for toggle lists, etc.). And its slash-menu makes it really easy to add several other types of blocks. I find myself missing a lot of its features when I’m writing Google Docs at work. I also appreciate how straightforward and helpfully limited Notion’s design options are. I’ve previously tried rebuilding my website in Webflow, but it always feels like a bit of a design project rather than actually focusing on writing content.
- It lets you easily create relational databases. This makes it really easy to create a blog with organizational features like tags, categories, and publishing status. You can also link databases with relations, so a database on my tech gear can let me link to all the blog posts of a particular piece of tech. Honestly, I think this is where a lot of beginners fall down a rabbit hole of architecting a super complex productivity system and never get started actually using it, but if you can get over that hump, it does offer a lot of power.
- Finally, it’s a content publishing platform. You can make any page public, which creates a published website with an easily copied URL. Any page that’s a child of the public page also gets published, so you can use this to create an entire website. The downside is that the generated URL is pretty long and hard-to-remember (https://ronforbes.notion.site/Ron-Forbes-e27d3a36931f45eaae6a6151654819ec), but that’s where a platform called Super comes in!
Enter Super
Super picks up where Notion leaves off by letting you create great looking, high-performing, SEO-optimized, customizable websites. Its free plan lets you create a site from a published Notion URL, which creates an easier-to-remember site (https://ronforbes.super.site/). The web interface lets you customize the appearance and behavior of the site without needing to dive into the code, but if you want to get more advanced, you can insert custom CSS and Javascript, which makes it easy to integrate Google Analytics.
The final step for me was upgrading to the paid plan for $12 per month which enables custom domains. I then redirected my DNS settings at Google Domains from Ghost to Super, and the new ronforbes.com was born!
Wrapping Up
What I love about this site is that it’s so closely integrated with the rest of my knowledge management system that it feels a lot easier to develop ideas into web content. All my notes, journaling thoughts, book summaries, and video scripts are in the same place, so it’s really easy to hop between them to write new blog posts.
Better yet, I’m no longer hopping between apps, referencing information in Notion, writing in Google Docs, and publishing on Ghost. It’s just all in Notion!
What’s Next?
- If you got value from this post, go ahead and give it a clap!
- Follow along on Medium, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram for more strategies for applying product thinking to live a healthier, wealthier, connected, fun life.
- If you’ve been considering ways to revamp your personal website workflow, or if you’ve tried the Notion + Super combo, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
- Learn more about how I’m using Notion to organize my life.
Be good to yourself. Be good to those around you. Peace!