Today Notion announced an exciting new feature Notion Sites. This is something many of their customers have asked for and a feature that belongs in a product like Notion. The lack of such a feature is what inspired the creation of Super over 4 years ago.
What does Notion Sites do?
Notion Sites is a 1st party solution for hosting Notion pages on your own custom domain. Besides for connecting a custom domain you can connect Google Analytics, edit some SEO settings and create a simple navbar. Notion Sites can quickly host Notion content on your own domain, however as of now this feature is limited.
How is Super different from Notion Sites?
Notion now supports Super’s very first feature natively and what started the Notion website niche - Custom Domains. Since launching this feature 4 years ago Super has expanded on Notion websites quite a lot. Some of the key differentiating features of Super are:
Page Path Controls
Pretty URLs or custom slugs allow you to customize the path at which a page lives on your site. For example this page on a Notion Site would live at https://super.so/b45b2c95a8e74d8a8b1dbed883e0b9f3. But since this site is hosted on Super the page path you see in your browser is https://super.so/blog/notion-sites-and-super. This optimization happens automatically and makes pages more human readable, memorable, and static. If you want to change the Notion page without changing the path you can do that with Super. If you want to redirect one path to another it’s also possible with Super.
Navigation
Notion Sites allows you to add a simple navbar to your site. Super takes site navigation a few steps further with a navbar, sidebar, and footer. Each of these navigation menus can have many links both internal and external, lists of links, and an image for your brand’s logo.
Navbar and sidebar support CTA buttons and the footer supports icons for social media links.
Custom Code
Shortly after the initial launch of Super we added the ability to add custom code to a site. This allows any CSS, HTML, or JavaScript to be added to a site or specific page. This powerful feature enables connection of third-party scripts for chat widgets, analytics, cookie banners, or anything else.
Super was created intentionally to be hackable. The HTML elements on a page and their class names are easily readable. This has allowed people to override the default styles of a site and make incredible themes. People have also used custom HTML to add their own components to pages and the Super Embed feature to run code in Notion Code blocks.
Themes
As mentioned above using the power of CSS and Super’s intuitive DOM tree you can create a beautiful theme for your site. But how can you make your site look amazing without knowing CSS or what a DOM tree is? Use a pre built theme! Super has an extensive gallery of themes created by both our team and our users which can be found on our templates page. We have more plans for site design mentioned at the bottom of this post.
Other notable features
Super enables many more features on a Notion website essential to modern web hosting. Some of them include:
- Manual publishing
- Custom fonts
- RSS & ATOM feeds
- File uploads (
ads.txt,.well-known) - Password protection
- Native analytics
How will Super continue to be different?
At Super we are constantly working to push the boundaries of whats possible in Notion web hosting. This new release from Notion has shown us we are on the right track and will expand the market for Super. Notion Sites is a good option for creating a simple and limited Notion website. But if you want to take your site to the next level with greater control and powerful customization features Super remains the best option on the market. We’re far from finished building Super and I’ll use this opportunity to tease one of the big features we’re working on.
Designer
While custom CSS allows people to create amazing themes for Super, those without coding knowledge struggle to make their site look how they want. We’re working to solve this issue with the Super Designer, a complete Framer-style site customization tool. After it’s initial launch we’ll be working towards creating a robust themes marketplace to make beautiful Notion sites available to all! A beta release should be expected in Q3 2024.
Thanks for reading and stay up to date with what we’re working on by following Super on X or joining our Discord channel.
NOTIONSITES
Jason Werner Founder
