Popular productivity tool Notion has long offered users the ability to publish their pages however they like, and now the company is expanding on this with the release of Notion Sites, which adds several new features to its existing publishing tools. Most are pretty straightforward, but together they make for a more polished publishing experience.
A lot of content-centric work is already done in Notion, like organizing a publishing calendar or working on actual documents. Over the years, Notion users have come up with different ways to turn pages into websites; there's even a startup founded solely on that idea. Given the clear demand, it makes sense for the company to focus on publishing that work directly.
Image credit: Notion
“One of Notion's coolest features is the ability to turn any Notion page into a public website with a single click,” Matt Piccolella, Notion's product lead, told me ahead of today's release. “The problem with these pages is that until now they've lacked a lot of the functionality you'd expect from a website.”
Notion Sites add these handy features, specifically allowing you to customize favicons, create navigation bars with links, use breadcrumb navigation, and more. These Notion Sites can now be easily published on custom domains and also come with basic SEO features (mainly title and description) and Google Analytics integration for better visibility and analytics. Notion users can now customize the share preview and define how their site will appear on social media. Notion has also added a search feature so that you can find information on the site itself.
As before, the idea here is to allow users to take a Notion page they've been working on internally and make it publicly available. This also means that nearly all of the existing Notion features will also appear on the public-facing Notion site.
Image credit: Notion
But one thing the team has notably steered clear of is the ability to deeply customize the site. Like Notion itself, there's a dark and light mode, but that's it. Piccolella says the team plans to add more visual theming options over time. The mission here, Piccolella says, is to make this “the easiest way to publish a beautiful website,” which means giving users lots of choice.
“I think one of the benefits of Notion is that you get the look and feel of Notion, a beautiful look and feel without any effort,” he says. “The fonts are really beautiful, the colors are really beautiful, and you don't have to dig into different visual styles and stuff. It's really a kind of visual minimalism that we like.”
Like other companies, Notion is considering not only how it can add AI capabilities to help users build their Notion sites, but also how it can put AI capabilities into their hands, though Piccolella hasn't yet shared details about what that might look like.