Notion Office Hours: Building Public Pages 🖼

hey everyone and welcome to notion office hours super excited to have you here I see there's tons of people from all over the place we've got Philippines we've got Germany Philadelphia India very cool Switzerland welcome welcome so today's session is all about people who are sharing public pages of notion who are hosting websites and ocean and interesting and creative ways we've got a few different people from the community who really bless awesome examples of ways that they're kind of leveraging the power of notion to make websites so leslie Schrock is here today who has one of the coolest public web sites that I have seen so I'm really excited for you to share this with us today Leslie is an entrepreneur an investor and an author I don't know if this is your first book Leslie it's as your native yeah cool so I know if you want to start your screen share and kind of introduce the guests here to your project cuz I think it's just such an interesting thing I am I am super curious how long you've been an ocean user and kind of how you even figured out that you could do this on notion well that's gonna sound this is gonna sound crazy I had never used notion before really No yeah so well I actually um I've been using notion for a while actually to manage tasks and like manage my to-do list especially as I was wrapping up the publication of my first book which just came out in December which is what this is all about so I had been using notion for task management like I used one of your free templates and just had kind of you know the different like to do like things to do in progress like archive of cool things and you know like a way for me to feel very accomplished about you know whatever I was but you know I published this book and I come from tech I've been in the tech industry for over a decade and for me publishing a book was like a bucket list item for sure it was a thing I'd always wanted to do but I knew that for me it wasn't gonna stop with pieces of paper bound together so much of what I wanted to stay and so much of what I wanted to communicate to my readers felt kind of out side of that that space you know when you write a book you have to kind of think of it as evergreen especially when it's it's the type of book that I wrote so my book is called bumpin the modern guide to pregnancy it is meant to be you know a guide for partners and pregnant women who want to understand what the process is like from conception all the way through the postpartum periods and it came from my own personal struggles you know I worked in health and tech for about a decade and you know at the end of the day like I came you know I decided to get pregnant and realized that you know a lot of the struggles I ran into I had a miscarriage I had a second pregnancy that didn't work out no one was talking about these things and no one was really giving me the information that I wanted you know like I just wanted simple things like what's the clinical data don't tell me what to do just like show me what my options are show me both what it looks like to have a non medicated birth and show me what it looks like to have an epidural you know so the book is very you know it's written to be evergreen content it's written for you know everybody but you know the book was published and I get lots of questions from readers and especially right now I'm getting a lot of questions from from readers about you know the impacts of Kovan 19 and so you know what I decided to do was you know make an interactive version of my book and just open source it for everyone and so you know I was very took me a while to figure out what platform to use actually so I was like do I do like Google Docs do I don't use quit do I use you know what is kind of the one thing to serve at all I have a square site a square space site that I use personally but you know like when you want to host Google Docs and content and a Spotify playlist and though they're disparate bits like how on earth do you bring that into into one platform and I just was you know after a lot of experimentation I just thought I don't really know what's gonna be able to to get there and so I started using notion and I mean it like I had really done anything other than use that template for task management but it was really fun for me to dive in I built this whole thing over the span of about a week and I've been plugging away at you know doing updates and stuff but really it took me like a day to kind of get my my am my feet under me I you know you I started with someone else's template which was like completely unrelated and I ended up not really using that much of the stuff but it was really good for me as a new notion user to get in there kind of see how this person had organized information and then use that as a jumping off spot rather than just starting cold so you know basically the way that I've structured the site is you know it's organized in two trimesters for anyone who is pregnant or is going through it with someone else trimester zero is conception the first second and third trimesters are like the ones we all know about then the fourth trimester is you know after the baby comes so you know I've got my little preface here I've got my favorite resources under here which you know this gets updated all the time I have a form that I used with Google I just embedded a Google Form you know I have my little updates here and then you know these menu items this was like a big thing I had to really kind of think through it was like how to organize the information and I really wanted it to feel like I wanted to feel familiar to people so I felt like it was very important to use you know footer navigation as well as header navigation so this is what I would consider the home page and I did actually there is a custom so I think you put the link in there to this it is Kovac bumpin com so I used super des Eaux to do custom URLs which was really fun and then you know you hit this first page and you can choose you kind of choose your own adventure here so we'll go into the second track of the trimester zero really quickly so I've got this nice header image so really it feels a lot like a normal website but it's so much more powerful than that I use this as kind of the way that I my you know my top navigation this is an outline of everything that is on this particular page so I'll take you through this one because I like this this page so I've got you know this nice overview of like Ovid specific stuff for pregnant people I have a checklist which this is a thing that actually is pulled straight out of my book my book has a checklist for every single trimester just because so much of what happens during you know when you're starting a family is like completely out of your control if I like to give people things that they can do and maybe some things that they aren't thinking about yet so this checklist feature was really awesome for me and then it's kind of deceptive one of the things that I've heard from people who have been visit and I've had you know thousands of hits at this point I actually hooked it up to Google Analytics because I do have those custom URLs so one thing that I heard from readers is actually like wow there's just so much in here but I wanted to structure it in a way that it didn't feel overwhelming so I used this nice accordion feature so each one of these yeah and this is actually straight out of my book I cut and pasted a lot of this stuff out of there so you can kind of you know go into the information that you want you know this share your parents and goals this is mostly just text but I'll go into some other things so this was a big one this has been the most frequently asked for thing but basically and I'm not sure if this is going to share or not no it's not but it's a Google it's a Google sheet so I you know I didn't embed the Google sheet here I didn't have a little bit of an issue with that but I have you know this great spreadsheet that I built which actually feels a lot more like a startup business a budget you know but I think this is kind of the way that I decided to go at it which is like you know structured into these sections you know you can go to kind of whatever you want but then what's really nice is when you're here at the top you can use the nav to just jump down the page hit exactly what you want so if you're only interested in building a baby budget you can just click on it and hit that I'll show you quickly something in the third trimester and then I'm happy to take questions yeah so you know wanted to embed some some links to things that I thought were important but again like each section has a checklist we have you know links to all these resources really cool stuff you know building birth preferences and then you know I was really excited because like one thing that was great for me during birth is I had music the whole time but how on earth do you put a playlist in a book and I also like wanted to include things from you know people that I'm in touch with and so we've got this cool little Spotify player in here which was great but yeah and I would love you know if anyone has feedback it's really easy to get in touch with me if you have ideas if you have you know things that you think are confusing but I actually built this in about a week I was a new notion user and it was a blast I just really loved you know I loved doing it it was really really cool though the name of the book is bumpin the modern guide to pregnancy and I can actually see all but a link to my Simon & Schuster published it so see here and um actually like if there are a couple people you know that are pregnant or anyone who you know is kind of asking questions right now I am trying to support local bookstores and so if you'd like a copy of the book we could do like a you know a little giveaway for a couple people and I'm happy to send it to you through book shop just as a as a way of supporting small businesses right now while well everyone is struggling a bit that is awesome and I know AJ was asking earlier like is this session oh you know okay for beginners and like you said this was something that you were able to do as a beginner and it looks really polished it looks really tight I like the fact that you said you know you you linked out to certain places instead of embedding it to you because I think it just kind of keeps the whole thing looking really clean and consistent yeah looks so good was it easy enough with their with using super and also embedding the Google Analytics side of things was that great forward enough that would you know I actually had support from the founder of super who saw the site and was like oh my gosh so we were messaging back and forth on Instagram actually and he helped me get everything sorted out the experience there was awesome like I was really impressed with with him and you know just the whole thing I mean because that was an important thing for me is I really wanted to make this a sub-domain of the you know bumpin comm URL instead of it just being like a random notion site so that people could more easily access it because I'm doing like actually in an hour from now I'm doing I'm speaking it like a big summit it's like a virtual summit so what I like to be able to do is just say hey like visit you know it's covent bumpin comm and then it's easy enough for people to just access that rather than like its notion dot slash urs tle you know like it's it's really nice to have that functionality but um yeah I was a total newb when I when I did this a friend of mine suggested that I did I use notion in that way and I was like I don't think that's what notions for but it's you know since then like actually my publisher Simon & Schuster a couple other friends in the publishing industry are really interested in what I've done and the feedback has just been awesome I think it's a great tool for authors or anyone who you know is thinking about how to how to really make something that that exists in one medium much more robust absolutely and I think it's probably a lot easier to update your notion page then it even is to update Squarespace which is not even difficult to update but it is just so much really yeah it's very very easy I know oh go ahead I know somebody suggested radu was saying I suggest you make use of galleries to even better structure the content but I actually like I think that's personal preference but I think what is so accessible about your layout is that it doesn't it's not using databases it's very simple with the text like you've got those toggles I actually think that's going to be I think a lot less intimidating to a beginner landing on the page that maybe doesn't know how to use notion so I think that's that's personal preference I think you've done a great job with the way you've organized the information yeah and and I think you know for me since a lot of my readers are not necessarily tech people in fact like a lot of them are you know like what is this notion thing and how did you you know is this something that I can use and you know where did this come from so a lot of the people that read my book are not you know they don't live in Silicon Valley or even coastal cities they work like you know they're they're living in Texas they're living in Nebraska they're living in Minnesota you know it's it's not an audience that's just living and breathing the tech industry all the time so I think that's another thing that's was really kind of important to me was that it feel familiar and accessible and not to kind of whiz-bang and that's what I was running into with a lot of other platforms actually it was just it was just way too complicated so yeah and Victor I totally feel you man I was um you know I I had a lot of really opinionated people kind of telling me what to do and how to manage my pregnancy and I read all these other books and I just kept thinking like I don't really want you to tell me what to do I want you to present the information and then I want you to let me construct the experience that's right for me and my family so that's you know that was really kind of what oh yeah I'm from Texas actually I grew up there so jr. I'm totally with you I just mean that there's there's a cult of knowing every single startup in Silicon Valley that is not quite as prevalent in Texas which is actually a reason that I like visiting Texas I went to school at the University of Texas at Austin so actually on the Advisory Board to to the school now so it's it's really cool for me to to kind of you know bring that and I've shared it with them too and they're like what is this like this is so cool I think there are impacts for you know people in the university setting all kinds of all kinds of different cool ways to use it that I think really fall out of the ways that you know a lot of us that have been steeped in tech for so long evaluate it love it I don't know if anyone else has any specific questions to maybe the way Leslie did that I know there were some questions about best practices about airing public pages and that sort of thing it sounds like your page I mean you're using super dot super dot SOT and you can also use fruition site comm we're going to chat with the founder of that as well but so this is a public page it's not like you're afraid of anyone sharing this it's sort of like make it widely accessible right so I think with the was the goal you know I love it when people buy it but honestly like I think it's really important right now that all of us just share information and help people have healthy pregnancies and you know start their families and just have access to you know not conjecture about you know what's going on with with Cova and everything else but just here's what we know I'm not going to postulate I'm not going to be an armchair epidemiologist I'm just posting you know things from my OB editor I'm in touch with a lot of people in that space but I thought it was really important that we just be as you know everyone needs to share right now a great question came in from Edgar about lovely use and lovely topic are you capturing any data emails etc from the people that land on this notion page I do have an email capture at the bottom I'm not I think a lot of people don't make it down there I would love to get everyone's emails you know and if there's anyone who wants to get updates from me I am you know working on getting sub stacks set up with with this kind of thing so I can update you know people based on like what's been published on the on the page and but yeah I mean for me really right now I'm so focused on just helping people because I get so many questions from from you know pregnant women who are very nervous about what's going on and I felt like it was just my responsibility you know as someone who's who's written a book and who's kind of you know become a speaker in the space to just be as transparent and open about it as I could so yes I'm definitely gathering data with google analytics but you know email has been kind of a secondary goal but I should do more of it I know someone made a comment that there was no mention of notion in these pages and was curious if it'll be somehow added in the future indicating pages made by notion I mean I by default if you're sharing an ocean page publicly you're going to see that little notion icon at the top right but I think what's nice about kind of hosting your site on it is you get to decide you could always put a little thing at the bottom like this site was built with notion but you don't need if you don't want to you don't have to do that but you kind of have the option to do that yeah I mean I actually would happily do that I yeah it is not on here anyway and I guess when I did you know when I did move away from when I when I started hosting it on my own domain that all disappeared um but I agree that actually like it's kind of a cool thing to add and it's certainly been a talking point with lots and lots of people really how did you do this like notion it's really easy actually I love that yeah what a great example I think anyone certainly for authors I think it's just such a brilliant example of what you can do so yeah Leslie thank you so much for this tour like I've been sharing your site with a lot of folks just to be like look what's possible this is yeah well it's it's I'm thrilled to be here and you know I'll stick around for a little bit if anyone has any other questions but otherwise I'm very easy to contact if anyone has questions and then you know if you get notes from people who would like a copy the book I'm happy to send it out via bookshop couple copies amazing thank you so much for coming on today thank you for having me very cool okay so I'm gonna we're gonna I'm gonna close your video window and then we're gonna invite the bearded notion notion er here so thank you so much Leslie thank you Cheers hey Nick hey guys can you hear me I can hear you welcome welcome so I'm Nick jeans is the notion well he's an ocean pro and the bearded notion ear and he's been hosting some pretty awesome resources on his site so Nick I don't know if you want to do a test screen share and we can pull up your examples yeah sure awesome yeah and people who are asking about changing the notion URL we are actually gonna get into that there's super deso and there's also fruition and we've got Stephan who is the founder creator of fruition who's going to talk through his open source project so that you can host your own custom domains on your notion sites so we will get more into that I promise can you see my screen alright can let me zoom in got your incognito window yep perfect yeah I started with the incognito window just because I'm doing some things that are a bit different so I wanted to be able to show those things so I put in Bearden Oceaneer calm and actually redirects to notion as a subdomain for beer and Oceaneer comm and so I'll talk a little bit about that but quickly I'll just kind of scroll through my site I've changed the layout a little bit say buy me a beer yeah it says buy me a beer so that's just buy me a coffee but I changed it to a beer because quite frankly would rather have a beer than a coffee but sometimes it was appropriate so no but yeah this is my site one of the comments that was in the chat was about the footer and so sure you guys something that I have done with that is I have this made with notion in Raleigh North Carolina embedded into my site as an HTML snippet and so I have a video coming out about HTML snippets of hosting em through AWS and so that's something that I've been kind of working on and playing with is getting different embeds to kind of work natively within notion that aren't necessarily like a forward slash embed property so that's something that I've done and definitely go ahead and check that video out another thing that I've done is created these link trees so for any that's kind of used Instagram for a little while link tree a couple years ago kind of blew up and the whole point of it was if you think about Instagram and your bio you can only have one URL and that one URL you could link to like maybe your website or something and it's so it's hard to drive traffic to your other platforms or your website or you know whatever it might be with only one link so like a tree started and it became a paid service so I have a template for this on my site as well but it's basically just a series of call-out blocks which have a different logo depending on the platform it links to and then obviously a link to the platform and so I have a couple of different versions of these so let me pull in some my actual notion window here and would that be a link that in in your Instagram profile then you would you would link to that notion page instead of a link tree link exactly yeah cool if I click on it hopefully it will show it you can see my link here is exactly the link that we were just at so if I click on this it essentially just gonna bring back to the page I was on but yeah there you can put different things so like absolutely doing this crab cast today I make sure that I updated this and put the link here because I put a post out about it so people could easily find it so it's a pretty good resource in a way for people to kind of find your fun your links yeah and so just to share something here so I have this is in my actual notion set up and so I have a couple of different kind of sites that I manage I guess some of them are personal for like resume type things and some of them are you know geared towards notion or something else so just to I kind of just type this out when Leslie was going over her section so that way it was a little bit maybe more clear to people but what I'm kind of doing is I'm remapping my main URLs to the subdomain and so I do that so that way if I want or in certain cases I do have my main site pointing to maybe a web site hosted on you know WordPress or a custom web site in AWS or something like that I have that flexibility and it also allows me to do this email forwarding so I can create Nick at all of my domains and then forward that to my personal gmail account so that way I avoid paying essentially the G suite fee of six dollars or twelve dollars whatever it is today because I don't need all of the other Google Apps because I already have that through another site and so there's no point in me paying for all of these users when I essentially already have the G suite for a different domain that I can just forward them all to so I also have a video in the pipeline on how to set this up and how to do the redirect as well using something similar to what Stephens done with fruition so hopefully I can I've been chatting with him a little bit so hopefully I can get some of these features integrated into fruition as well and then I'll also colouring out with kind of the links something that I'm doing here as well is I have my main link tree which kind of goes to everything so be it like a personal link that I'm you know sharing publicly like my Twitter or something like that and then I also have a forward slash link tree link for kind of each of my sub domains if you want to call them that which go to only you know beer notion ear links yeah and so something else that's I think people would find interesting is another thing that I was talking to Steven about is this discuss kind of thing on the bottom of my site so this is where you can go in and basically have these comments and these reactions here and so if I go to a different page on my site and scroll down you can also see that this shows up as well we actually had a question come in about that they're like Nick can you show us a little bit about how you're building that page the IMDB one okay yeah but then on my link tree I don't have it so something that I kind of customized there's some resources out there about embedding this discuss block into your site and so what I've done is gone through the JavaScript and modified it a little bit basically created tags so what Stephens done with the hiding the slugs so I built off of correction with the goal to basically take the feature that I added and embed it back into fruition site calm as a additional feature and so what I've done is I've created a tag so you can say I want to discuss on every single page of my site or I want it on none of the pages and then you can also have a white list and a black list so if you set the flag to I want it on all my pages but then you want a black list essentially your link tree page so that it's cleaner and there's no comments on it then you would just add the /link tree slug into the actual basically list and so the my idea is that by the way that I've set it up is to work with Steven he's created and he'll show this as well he's created this little web app you can go in there and add just like a checkbox to be able to click it on and off to turn the different you know discussed blocks off on certain pages that's kind of my goal and I also am looking towards kind of automating the updates of having having your slugs be hidden so that's another feature that I'm sure Steven will talk about so that's kind of how I have done it so more to come on that and hopefully it'll be kind of natively embedded into what Steven Scott as well a question came in from gray that I think is a good one he's like I want to hear what Nick finds frustrating what did you want to do an ocean website stuff that you found that you can't yet and so maybe that that was part of it but are there any limitations whether it's in you know tracking you know are there any SEO limitations of hosting your site on notion like are there anything that you kind of find still frustrating or isn't quite there yet yeah so if you get to know me you'll kind of find out that if there is something that doesn't work or doesn't happen or doesn't really work well in ocean weather I can actually make it happen or not really anything in life I'm gonna try and so that that's actually led to a lot of cool findings as well but yeah I mean from the SEO standpoint I'm not you know too familiar and not an SEO guru by any means but I think there's definitely things there that could be improved and for different things like I'm gonna go ahead and show this and hopefully people don't hate me because it's not out yet but a lot of people are creating databases for like their watch lists and stuff and we all know that the API is coming the API is coming so what I've actually done and this is just like a little test that I've done is put the IMDB tags into a name field and then using the unofficial API on the back end I'm actually pulling a bunch of information from IMDB like the cover and then all of the information like how long it is how many ratings it has use the director the runtime when those release things like that so when you're doing things like this it's it makes a little bit harder to be able to track and like if you want to kind of monetize this how do you actually track who's using the automation and who's not so that's something that I've been exploring that I think as the API comes out will will make it a little bit more a little bit easier to do there's some other things in the back ends with doing different code things with Spotify and things like that where you want to be able to not have to log in every time and so I know that's a frustration that a lot of people have had but you know using the custom the custom URL you're able to kind of put a lot of things into your site which you don't get out of the box from notion by default so yeah hopefully that answers it that's pretty cool that's awesome yeah I mean you've got tons of great videos and resources on your site too so yeah if people want to go a little bit deeper a little more advanced a go-to notion dog bearded no Shamir com I think we've included that in our resources below as well that's awesome is there anything else any other like fun or weird you know use cases or things you're experimenting with or things are excited about ya show this I doesn't it used to have its own domain but obviously with the coronavirus and everything kind of shutting down we're not doing these anymore but this is something that I've created to I host the cornhole tournament everyone they here locally and so I've used notion to kind of create that landing page so I can there's a template for this as well called event sign up on my on my site but I used the type form back when type form was free and didn't have as many restrictions on it so that's what the sign up and unsubscribe stuff is but what was really cool that I was able to do is for any of you guys that do different tournaments or maybe gaming because I think that's what's geared towards when you do tournaments there's this thing called challenge which does bracket generation and it's got a nice API as well but what I was able to do is basically go and create the bracket and hopefully that loads go and create the bracket and actually just embed it into the page so that way people could come to the site they could use it to sign up they could use it to check you know what the bracket is who they're playing and things like that and when I started to integrate before Kove it essentially was yeah there we go creating a text tool so what it would do is it would actually look at the bracket and it would say okay this person is now you know available to play because this score was just reported for the previous tournament and actually sent out an automated text to the teams essentially to say you know player 1 and player 2 are playing on even board 3 or whatever it was so this is something cool that I did a long time ago actually and now that a lot of different features have come out and what Stephens done and super and those things those things weren't even out and kind of a thing in notion so I need to go back and revisit and kind of clean this up a little bit some that's the kind of fun that I did that's cool another question popped in how much coding have you done for your pages so really outside of what Stephen has available in first insight I've done a little bit here and there for getting the the discuss boxed in there but theoretically if that gets embedded that there is any code to get what I have done on my beer and Oceaneer page I have done some you know HTML stuff but I've tried to hide a lot of the kind of code from the user and a lot of it is just kind of using a HTML generator and then copying pasting those things so it's relatively it does use code but it's you know copy and paste code that's created for you so I try to make those things as user friendly as possible because I know everyone's not doing stuff with code but yeah I haven't I haven't released as much content as I would have liked up to this point just because I've been spending a lot of time with the unofficial API trying to get different use cases out there and kind of play with it a little bit so that way when the official API comes I can kind of hit the ground running so if you guys do have any ideas or like struggles I know like duplicating large databases or or large setups is an issue that a lot of people are having so I'm trying to explore those issues and see how I can create a tool to be able to you know solve those problems for people so if you guys do have any ideas just drop me a line or you can go and comment on my site and I'll start tinkering with it and if I get something you'll definitely be the first beta user that I need to give me some feedback so that's awesome thanks so much AJ was saying wow really really handy and helpful an official API can we have a look at it Milo was asking yeah so the what I use for all of my kind of development within notion is Python and so I can put the link in the chat as well it's just called notion - Pi which is a library that has been created to interact with API so let me I'll put this in the chat cool great yeah people are interested in the kind of the code bit as well I can for sure do some videos on that or you know whatnot and if you're looking to kind of create your own or do a walkthrough we can definitely discuss that as well so cool thanks so much Nick really appreciate it yeah cool and I've added your link to the resources below so again you can always check those out afterwards and yeah thanks Nick well I'm gonna close your video and we're gonna say hello to Stephen from fruition site so thanks again Cheers yep thanks guys Stephen hey great to meet you it's a pro as everyone else to all the notion pros and consultants but yeah it's been great to interacting with everyone in the past couple of weeks so for anyone that doesn't know Stephen is the you know like us founder a creator of fryers I don't know if you want to do if you want to do a screen share and show fruition site but I've been playing with it myself it's so much fun it's really straightforward even if you're not super techy if you do want to host a custom URL on your notion set up so through a stranger just to show everyone let's do it all right and then we'll have Conrad Lynn come on and then we'll do some Q&A toward the end so hopefully we can address some of the folks that have had some like very specific questions around sharing and databases I die usually recommend sharing a different browser window than your crowd just so we don't have the orientation yeah faster be alright here we go cool so frisson it's a little side project I did a couple weeks ago just I was thinking it'd be really cool to build your own website with notion and with sites like super dotnet so it's actually a really convenient if you want to you know payload with the money per month and have a managed solution meaning you don't have to really worry about the hosting but they're folks out there who want to do by themselves a little save a little bit of money and this is what Frisian is made for and thank you Nick for basically showing what for shouldn't really appreciate it that so I can save a lot of the same thing that Nick has already talked about but the basic idea is you can have pretty links so you can see here fishing comm it doesn't have all the like you know usually there's a page ID at the end and have custom domains you can also pretty Ling's include these pretty URLs so for example I can like I have my own like little database setup showing all the sites people have filled and you can see here the URL just set the showcase instead of the usual notion page ID which is long and hard to share and I know everyone has been pretty frustrated by that but this is like a weight around that so when did you discover that as an issue like when did you start working on this project started working on it about a month ago it only took me about a weekend to do it [Laughter] thanks to someone open-source the script to actually enables custom domain so the great thing about open-source community is you get to extend on top of what people build and I really encourage folks to build on top of frisson as well which is what Nick has been doing and that's great well you know sort of software is you know you know how it works you can actually see it and you can play around with it so um yeah so I took the existing script I made a little bit better with things like pretty URLs you can add things like google fonts add your own script and all of these is inspired by super dad so I just wanted to make it accessible for folks who want to spend some time but save some money um it doesn't even take that much time to even Ferno time from what i've heard but you know they're folks who be able to done it faster it would just be so I'm not gonna go over the step-by-step yeah for anyone who's watching and are interested in doing it by themselves you can go to friction site calm and follow these steps there every step has screenshots again using the toggle which is Leslie showed it's actually really quite amazing it used CloudFlare which is a way to kind of route things and it's free for the most part you la traffic you do have to pay for cloud fare but for most folks say you just have your own personal website it should be alright and that's Nick nicely mentioned I built a little front end like a web app for you so you can just go here you can say hey you know I have a domain let's call it like lotion or something and then here you would type in you would copy the link from notion and paste it here and what this does is it generates a script so if you're familiar with the open source solution out there you have to kind of manually update this yourself which is kind of painful so I built a little front-end to help you do that easily and you can also add things like pretty links so if I want like lotion calm slash the belts and then you paste the ocean URL here you can add meta 1 slash contact and then you can paste a link for contact here and then you can also I like customize your page title description and a bunch of other things now you need to do is copy the code and then paste it into the cloud code editor I know I'm saying keep skipping quite but yeah it was pretty straight basically if you read carefully even if you're not you know a coder if you read it very carefully and you follow the directions everything is laid out really really clearly and I think it's it's pretty straightforward and there's lots of people in the notion community too I know there's like notion made simple there's people on Twitter so if you do want to try the tool and you kind of get stuck there's lots of people I think who are out there kind of willing and ready to help so yeah and it's been great hearing Auto responses from the notion community I never knew how big the community and how like Pastor that everyone this all the emails and stuff like that makes me really excited to see like where notion heads in the future and especially with the API that is coming up yeah I'm pretty excited to see where I can take that in the future um if you guys have any ideas in terms of things that you want to enable I'm all yours you know my email is on the site so shoot me an email if you want to have ideas for more functionalities or you know in the future what the API can enable um I'm happy to happy to help out so yes do you have any predictions or kind of I guess things that you're really excited about once the API opens up like what do you think is gonna happen for your fruition yeah I have a lot of ideas myself I am also very transparent loved to share with you guys - if someone ends up building a better version than I did that's great good for them like there - I was actually thinking about the first one is basically like zapier but don't for an ocean so you can for example say you want to keep your current setup on WordPress because of all the commenting functionality all the integration you already have set up like in that just have your content control in notion so you can just end in notion everything gets automatically updated on WordPress and it's like a two-way sync and then thing it like for example we can do that for Shopify - like Shopify stores you can update your all yours or your products that you add a new gallery and notion it becomes a new product and Shopify or you get a new sales in Shopify and then you see that it's like a new role on your state or upon stay on your orders table you can do that from Belgium you can do that for like basically every SAS software out there and I'm pretty excited - that's one of the thing I'm exploring and if anyone's you know I'm sure many of you have thought up the same thing - and happy to you know hear your thoughts as well and then the second thing I assume Marie it's like I wonder if there will be ideas to have the API to help consultants like you to simplify the work streams from them I imagine you have you know certain setups for certain types of clients then if there will be a front-end interface for you to say hey like for say you're working for a like a design agency and usually the building blocks are all the same like currently Jen you have templates let's say you want to mix and match like you'll have say a client's table and then you have like a CRM you have like bunch of different things but you know you just have one front-end you co hey I want this I want this I want this and then it just adds it right to the UM to their claims workspace so that's just on my wish list for a long time yep that's pretty awesome well yeah that's coming in from like engineer perspective I know there are a lot of passionate consultants out there would love to help again very cool that's awesome thank you so much Steven the tool is amazing I'm really excited to experiment even more with it so and of course Conrad is a user of fruition as well right you're like a yeah III think I'm your number one fan for sure you've unlocked so any interesting possibilities for me and I really like what you're talking about for the like no code complete builder I think that's amazing because that's what I need because I have so many different templates now that you know if they can connect in like a dynamic way based on what you know our community wants like they only want you know meal planning and they want you know being intentional this way and you want success plan and it comes together that'll be so lovely you guys in person for the first time today because I you know I literally just came on the whole scene like a couple weeks ago and you guys have been experts and been here you're so appreciate all the work you guys already put in feelings feeling's mutual yeah before here amazing yeah so Conrad you want to showcase just some of the ways you've been using permission and I know you've got like a pretty advanced set up too so I think it's really cool to just see behind the scenes of your setup yeah of course and I'm actually super excited because there's just so much you can do with it so let me bring it up I'll follow your advice and not share my crowdcast ganado so be there but yeah keys yeah looks great so I've been pretty known for doing some ridiculous things for action so I want to go like stage by stage it's kind of sure you like from like a piggy understood there's like a one minute setup to maybe like a 1050 and even an hour setup you know one hour set up rather uh you know 15 minutes an hour so you know the the first thing is like having an ocean blog and of course this is you know quite straightforward you know just based on what you've already heard before you just have you know blog thought whatever domain you want or you have it as a is a sub domain or gonna have a normal domain but you can see that it's very clean you can put things in like a list view you can see you know the write the writing you do and then you scroll through it's just basically a blog site but something that's quite interesting is I also put like a embed of a signup form as well I know someone was asking before you know it could you add like a sign-up form to capture emails and I say yes you definitely can and one thing that's pretty interesting here - I'm just gonna clear my cookies so I can show you how it looks but I also have a embed because of Stephens amazing fruition to utility I can also have a pop-up form that comes up actually I decided to have a slide-in form here and you see right here then it slides in and then I can capture any email that I wants and it's basically like as if I had my own sites and you were except that I'm using notion except this took me like five minutes to build and I just hope in like that another really interesting way to use notion to and something that Steven alluded to is you can use it to feed into your normal sites that using on like WordPress or etc you personally use gatsby j/s so basically what happens is these are the same this is the this is exactly where I write my blogs so I write my blogs in notion I write my newsletters in notion but on my website I actually am able to see it all on the react fronts and so the latest technologies I can see all my blogs presented in a different way so basically I have a whole new way of presenting this information but actually on my dedicated site as well but using the same database back-end so that's also really cool because that means I don't copy and paste any of my content in right I just need update one database you know my notion site gets updated my proper you know excite kiss update I say proffer of quotes I think anything at everything anyways like it's just super cool because like I can even host my whole newsletter now from from notion so like everything is now just straight from the ocean again I have the same pop-up form here I even have like embedded you know email signup forms as well if you want to subscribe to my newsletter so it's it's really really seamless in my opinion and I just think you know I I personally save so much money and every and every example I show you I'm gonna tell you exactly how much money I saved okay so before I was using like Squarespace I was using web flow definitely the minimum was like a hundred bucks a year if not like 200 bucks depending on which service you go with because you know some were more expensive than others now I pay zero so that's pretty cool for me and if you host on metal fly it's also completely free to host as well so you can have an AWS server powering your site without even meaning to pay a single cents so that's pretty cool for me and then just to scale it up another way you can use it is if you have like a wiki of sorts and of course you know public wiki's is not a new idea that notion is brought up but this is like a public wiki on your own domain which I thought was pretty cool because it means that it's more accessible than having like that huge long slug you know that idea behind the URL that you know we have and you can just have a place where you can share publicly what you do like some what resources for example this is for the coast street community a community that I'm building that's basically just people that are really passionate about productivity growth and learning and basically I can even use like gallery views or in this case board views really an interesting way where I'm showcasing like what kind of content I'm going to deliver a forum community initiatives based on you know each day of the week so this is something that I definitely couldn't do in like a normal website without having to code something specific and I just I'm able to take like elements that notion already has and then essentially build use it as you know the front end of my site so to speak without having to build any knickknacks and use any code so so far still no code use right and it's still completely free this is all so completely free um nothing extremely special about this in terms of integrations but the next one is going to be the one that's super super interesting so let's let's go to that one now so one thing that I you know I run a business so I'm a founder of a start-up and one thing you know that when you're starting up a company is you always need to test out your ideas you constantly need to keep testing what kind of copy works for your customers what do they resonate most with you see you know what they click what links they click on your site it's just a lot of things you can you keep iterating and if you have to hire developer every time you want to code a new website or a new version of website or even if you use any of those professional website builders that are for landing pages optimized so like talking about like Unbounce I'm talking about those kind of sites like that takes like a hundred bucks a month so that's a lot of money to be spending especially when you're bootstrapping and you're trying to get off the ground so what notion is able for me to do now is I have a site called power up currently calm and it's just a consulting site for notion stuff that I'm able to help with but basically I'm able to you know use custom fonts so you see the fonts looks very different from what you would see on ocean right you'd be able to see like you can make something very very beautiful you can have completely however you want to make it look and feel like and something that I think is really cool here is I also embed a chat bot so this is also completely free and again is through the use of crucian that you can embed a chat bot and basically this is a you know bonafide landing page there is no difference between this and something you would get professionally for a hundred bucks a month because you get a chat bot you get to have your own custom domain you get to have a signup form at the slightly at the contact form at the bottom so I guess oh this is collecting you know anybody that wants to have an inquiry with me I can have links that goes back to top you know and then I can just jump around the page like everything is as you would need in a professional business sites and I just think that's so amazing for the low low price of zero dollars a month yeah and only requires a little bit of code a little bit of no code you know wizardry but yeah yeah like just copy and pasting the scripts and again I think Stephens done a really wonderful job putting like a UI where you just copy and paste the scripts for like Google Analytics or you know your chat bot that you find and it's just one line of code like seriously it's one line of code and then you put it in and then it works out of the box so it's quite interesting here so the chat bot is part of fruition it's like a pre-existing thing that you can use through fruition or do you kind of have to have a service or how does that work yeah so the chat bots really cool like you can use any chat bot you want because every chat bot has this kind of integration I just use HubSpot here because it's completely free it's part of their free plan too I think is unlimited chats as well so there's no limitation unlike some other chat BOTS you know you got to pay from day one or there's a limit on like a hundred chats those are just a bit not friendly to me at least so I use that is free and then what happens is you just log in to their portal once you set up you know on HubSpot then they give you a link and then you paste that link of the chat bot into the frisson utility and then it'll generate a script for you to then paste into CloudFlare to get it all up and going so yeah it's quite it's quite easy to do um and I have a video showcasing how to do that actually and that video is only altogether like five minutes long so you can kind of imagine how long this whole process takes in general but I think the longest part of this is just building the page to how you like like the look and feel and if you're doing that in notion anyways because you enjoy building on notion I don't think there's necessarily anything that's too difficult for you to try and like I said you know a lot of the things that you would have to find a template for and then code it in terms of like gallery views in terms of you know lists all those things you don't have to do anymore and it's just really seamless and you're able to really uh you know get the really beautiful looking field that you'd like um and also like I I do have like a another interesting example to show - like for example like if you are a consultant yourself as I know allow you like me admire Murray a lot and you know maybe have considered going into doing consulting or doing or building like resources and selling courses that kind of thing you can kind of imagine something like this as well where you can have like a nice landing page you can have you know a a view for different things that you offer in terms of you know horses or templates or anything you have basically I'm just giving you examples of how you can reimagine everything in your notion workspace to be Ashley not just your internal system but external public facing kind of engagement platform for you to not only engage people but also collect information about them to help you deliver more value to them so a good example of that like something that I find myself is pretty ridiculous to like it and if I think it's ridiculous I think you guys think it's definitely ridiculous but basically like I have a place where I kind of collect reviews right you know because I want to know the feedback on the resources I give and essentially you fill this out and one thing I have is because I'm using chili-pepper by the way this is chili pepper dot IO chili pepper is a free forms provider for notion but basically like you can create like multi selects etc and what I've done is because of their utility again no code is you can use a web hook which means that you can send a response when someone finishes this form to anywhere you want you can send it directly into an ocean database which I'll show you in a second you can send it to your email as an email you know someone sent to you know a review or what I've done which is really really over the top is you see that light behind me I make that go you know rainbow colors whenever I get five-star reviews if you have it develop nice you want to just jump awake you can send me a five-star review you'll see that about waking you up for sure and then I'll send a very nice thank you email back to you thanking you nice to review but yeah so there's a lot of things you can do this notion now I just think it's amazing and like if you even wanted to have like guided tours through your site like you can use type form I think we had Nick talk about that too that's all embedded and again that's all on a custom domain and uh even with the prettier your URL so you see that it's not just a sub domain but it's also like and ends log as well that is my customized slug so in this case is gamify and then just I think one more last example I want to show cuz I'm just so excited here is that example is if you want to collect information from your customers or collect information from your community maybe you run like a church group maybe you run like you know even a classes right you want to some way for you to interact better with the people yet you're talking to well you can have that forum and right beside it you can have the table for showing you know everyone what the submissions are so for example if I just put something you know I think Murray's a hero right here oh she's from Earth and then you know makes amazing notion systems and helps everybody be productive right and then my name is Conrad and if I submit this you'll see that this immediately pops up in the right-hand side because it becomes a new submission and it goes directly into my notion database so this is just trying to help you unlock like oh my god there's just so many things I could do like you think about it like the reviews come up automatically right for you know if you're like say yeah you know our first presenter she had a book right and she want maybe she wants to collect reviews and that's how she we have yeah so I'm happy to answer any questions I there's a lot of utility here definitely yeah anything that comes up no this is good I was kind of yeah hoping to have you kind of at the end because I figured there would be some some questions as we like sort of escalated our our advanced level throughout this session and so there's definitely couple questions that have come in yeah so people have had their mind blown people are pretty stoked I know we had a couple people asking about like where they can find out you know how you did that in Gatsby and all that stuff we did include there's the resources from the session below and so again you could always go to Konrad Lynn comm or blog Conrad Lynn calm and ocean Conrad Lynn calm and all of those links will be included below so you guys can dive a little bit deeper into Conrad's content if you're interested in going a little bit deeper but question yeah to help you not be so scared about the gas painter integration as well I made a video guide on it it's all together ten minutes and you I have like a very detailed like step by step process how to do it honestly I didn't have much knowledge of coding beforehand I probably knew some HTML and it was like a very beginner level maybe I coded like one email before my wife and is actually through his project was a weekend project for me and that was Friday so maybe you spend this weekend try it out you can have a really beautiful website you know this is just one side of it right this is an ocean powered side but then you can even create custom pages that look really really nice you don't have like images videos in the background you know you can you know have a mole out windows and all these resources I also include in that blog that I wrote to share this information so you can just go to on my website and then you can see this is one of the guides I have and yeah it's really fun it's all free and then I was really happy that you guys would find interest in it yeah yeah no that's great this is really great I think people are definitely gonna be checking that out and I mean even Leslie said you know she wasn't a super-advanced notion user she'd only been using it for task management and was able to do that within a week so I think there's there's really a lot you can do does take a little bit of tinkering being willing to play with it and you'll get the hang of it over time so it's awesome that there's you know so many people here providing amazing resources that we can go check after-the-fact gray and asked a question I thought was kind of interesting you was saying as a designer I'm kind of frustrated with the grid layout of notion aside from aside from the icon overlapping the cover image any neat layout image font tricks you'd like to share yes I have a lot of those so I think that might be interesting for you and I think the best example I have is like this one this site I don't think you normally would if you guys still see my screen sorry yeah okay yeah so I don't think okay so I don't think you normally you would see an ocean site that looks like this and I think it was because it was really intentional and I by the way I have to give credit words to Marie had the initial version of this and I you know I've read a lot of creative insights from her to then add ons again thanks to Marie for that but um basically like you know you can have a lot of different dividers that are segregating your content so that you can have interesting views like this and even especially like this like normally you can't Center font you can't Center you know headers or you can't Center you know images right so you might ask how do I do this so actually I do want to show you this because I think is interesting and this is a good learning experience for block people who are looking to do something like this so let me just change screens over to my um over to my editable version one second hopefully I don't take too long to do this and then I'm going to show this and then for now I'm going to turn off my my dark mode so it looks like how that's out there I'm a bit laggy right now okay cool so how does this work right so if I hover over here you'll see that I actually have a device I have three columns here I've made a three column section here so if I expand this this way right you can see it's actually going to still stay left aligned but it's actually because I have empty space in this column and in this column that it's becoming smushed into the center so that's how I force something to be centered even though the ocean doesn't technically allow it and another way that I do things is I also like to use images right so you see there's an image here but how is this centered well again it's because I have a I have a section here and here that's kind of sandwiching everything together so that's the that's that's one hack on how to Center information like Center headers that are Center images and if you want to do something like this um what I've done like how do I make like my signature right aligned well this is more like a very low level half in my opinion but anyway I'll show you it's basically like just an image so if my image is just that long so it's office Huggy all the way to the right now but another example here's like I have like empty space right here just so I can have some like good spacing between like this kind of like a hero text and this kind of you know jiff that you know motivational kind of thing yeah and and I like another thing like see another half that I can show you that I thought pretty cool yeah even for these kind of things like I like spacing things out a lot and again I think notions one thing is that if you put everything like without any line breaks it kind of just mushes all together so again like my my happy thing is like I'm able to you know put nice dividers between things you know put some images so I'm explaining it a bit so there's some space between here and then you know just being able to like use different styles of fonts and you know even coloring fonts different ways I think it's pretty interesting to kind of uh just change the look and feel yeah I I think that that's how I say it oh and another thing - uh another thing that I like to uh where I want to show this one more thing here is our global blocks I wanted to show global blocks so one thing that is really useful when you start building these kind of public sites is how do you make the most minimal changes to every single site when you have a change so for example if you have a good generic footer right for example my footer generally is like you know contact me so all these texts are stored in the global block database where I changed of global block one time and every page that has this specific content will change as well so that means that I have you know four public-facing notion sites I don't have to go in and change every single page and every single sub page where I may have a credits or may I have you know any other you know a form for example so let's say I want update the form I want to add one more field I need update all the forms in one go well I don't have to go in and plug in play every single one and I just changed one global block yeah love it someone was saying how can you how can you change completely a database once you've done it I've created a calendar database for my tasks but I struggle a lot to make it a plain page I'm not sure if I'm not sure how to answer that how do you completely change a database once you've done it do you mean changing the properties or changing the content like are you worried about the integrity of your contents I'm not sure there was no name on that person's question there was a couple questions about sharing and permissions that someone said I think could be could be worth digging into if you have time could you go over tips and best practices for shared pages go into more details about the differences used for public pages last shared pages how can I give a restricted access to collaborators and control what they see and don't see and I don't know if if we have time necessarily to cover that but there is some great notion documentation around the sharing and permissions and that sort of thing but you can either you can either make your page public access in the top right-hand corner of your of your site or you can have kind of private pages that you're only inviting collaborators in by email so that's on a per page basis and you can have pages inherit the properties of the sort of pages that live inside them so don't know if we have that much time to go into it in this particular session because I know there's a lot of nuance around the sharing and you got to get a little bit comfortable and familiar with it but in the case of these pages that are used with fruition site those are public pages right so all of those are are turned on available to the public I'm assuming you've turned off duplication abilities but people can access that publicly yeah I think - like if you use the others hacks around it but just something for you to know as well like if you share a page with the crucian hack or supera so whichever you choose people can't duplicate the page until they go to the actual notion of the SSL domain as well so if you're sharing something with the intention of it being duplicatable you probably want to keep a link inside the page that says hey you want to duplicate this click this link first so that you can go to your actual notion that iso domain and eat it yeah otherwise then you know if you just want to share it as like a public website and of course you may not want that to be duplicatable then just turn it off and just keep it you know public yeah well has someone was saying this is awesome I was spending more than 180 pounds a year on my Squarespace I could actually make the same content even better on notion yes you could who I want to add on there yeah it mission like unbalanced you save a hundred bucks a month hundred US a month like for sure like that's their lowest pricing which was frustrating for me owner and then for Squarespace for you know Wix or you know any of those generally is around you know maybe 25 bucks 25 bucks a month at the most maybe five bucks to 25 then you have hosting if you go like oh daddy or you go like WordPress or anything that's like another ten fifteen if you do like form collecting forms type form I know Nick has mentioned their price has gone up so unfortunately they're not as you know friendly for the wallet anymore but you know I know for sure like you know just form collecting is not a cheap service like there's a lot of services that offer that again for 50 hundred bucks a month so all these things add up so much and then I'm trying to tell you guys that you know if you guys want to start a business today it's not hard if you want to tell the world your story it's so easy and notion is youth all the tools you need especially with the free plan now especially great creators like you know Steven creating you know that amazing fruition utility especially with all these hacks that everyone's passing around like you don't need to code anymore really truly you don't ever need to code anymore you think and I just think it's amazing there's no more excuses right it's we can't we can't kind of blame the technology for for not taking action anymore hmm yeah I don't know if you have any resources on global blog somebody did ask about that I know we did cover it so I'm not sure at what point that question came in but yeah yeah so if you go to their resources I think Marie link one of my latest videos which talks about these kind of hacks I do go and death about how to get that global block blocks working and again I do like to give credit where it's due it was introduced by someone called Ben Smith in the discord community he's great guy he found that hack and then William not polarized it it's also on his YouTube channel where you can find out how it's done but I also do share along this kind of stuff you know how I did it how I use it for like embed blocks like my reviews form and that stuff so just that reason below and or I'll leave a link the YouTube video here if you guys are really interested yeah that's pretty great yeah one of the ways I use global blocks is for quick adding items to my weekly agenda or inbox or whatever so that no matter what page I'm looking at I can very quickly add a note or an idea and then if I am done with that I can delete it and it kind of deletes it from everywhere so it kind of a quick capture which is pretty handy that's entirely but there so there's obviously so many interesting ways you could do it so I know we're like over time there's still lots of questions and such but you know we'll probably just have to take a peek at them and distill them and figure out if there's room for you know a secondary session on some of these topics so again Conrad's got a ton of great resources so definitely put that on your reading list for this weekend and check some of those out thanks everyone for coming and again don't forget to check out those notion resources notion conrad lin comm hope this session was interesting and helpful to see how both you know power users but also everyday people are using notion in some pretty fascinating ways so thank you everyone for coming Thank You Conrad for showing us your amazing setup amazing I think people are pretty inspired and excited so yeah Corey said Conrad stuff has helped me beat the weekly slog so great all right Thank You Marie thank you everybody really happy to be here and yeah just let me know if you have any more questions always happy to help and you guys have a wonderful rest of the week and have a good weekend awesome thanks so much Conrad thanks everybody Cheers

Channel: Notion

Views: 5,794

Rating: 4.9694657 out of 5

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Id: BTKcDlow9dw

Length: 72min 56sec (4376 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020