The popular productivity tool Notion has long allowed its users to make any of their pages public. The company is now expanding on this with the launch of Notion Sites, which adds several latest features to existing publishing tools. For the most part, they are quite easy, but together they supply a more polished publishing experience.
A whole lot of content-focused work already happens in Notion, whether it’s organizing editorial calendars or actually working on documents. Over the years, Notion users have come up with all forms of ways to turn their pages into web sites – and then some startups they were even built solely on this concept. Given the clear demand, it makes sense for the company to focus on publishing this work directly.
“One of the best features of Notion has always been that with one click you can turn a Notion website into a publicly accessible website,” Matt Piccolella, Notion product lead, told me ahead of today’s launch. “The problem with these sites is that they have always been missing a lot of the fun facts and tidbits you would expect to find on a site.”
Notion Sites adds some of those bells and whistles. Specifically, this implies having the ability to customize your favorite icons and create navigation bars with links, in addition to use breadcrumb navigation. These Notion sites can now be easily published to custom domains, and for higher visibility and analytics, basic search engine optimisation features (mainly title and description) are also available, in addition to Google Analytics integration. Notion users can now also customize their sharing previews to determine how a site is represented on social media. To find information inside the pages themselves, Notion has added a search function.
Like before, the idea is to help users publish any Notion page they have been working on internally and then make it publicly available. This also signifies that virtually every existing Notion feature may even appear on the public Notion website.
One thing the team has shied away from is the ability to customize sites in detail. There is a dark and light mode, similar to in Notion itself, but that is about it. Over time, Piccolella said, the team plans to add more visual theme options. The mission here, Piccolella said, is to make it “the easiest way to publish a beautiful website” — meaning numerous selections for the user.
“I think one of the great things about Notion is that you can get that Notion look and feel, which is kind of effortlessly beautiful,” he said. “The fonts will look really nice, and the colors will look really nice, without having to go through a bunch of different visual styles and stuff like that. It’s actually kind of the visual minimalism that we like.”
Like seemingly every company, Notion is also looking at how it may possibly add AI functionality to help users build Notion sites, but also make AI features available to users. However, Piccolella wasn’t ready to provide details yet on what that may appear to be.