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Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

potion.so

51–60 of 102 posts

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#51
post #8
post #2

notion websites are so slow. Google's page speed for your home page has a score of 42. Why does it say "fast page speed" and "great seo"? This [1] demo scores 81 and this[2] has a 68. [0] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [1] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

To be honest, 42 isn't actually that bad. PageSpeed Insights scores are incredibly strict (that's a good thing) and not at all linear with visitor perception of loading speed. news.ycombinator.com has a 100 score, but if you compare the actual "Lab Data" it's not a massive difference. First Contentful Paint: news.ycombinator.com: 1.3s, potion.so: 2.7s The biggest difference is Time to Interactive: news.ycombinator.co…

The hit to your SEO rankings matters a lot more than the actual load time.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#52
Don't take this the wrong way, it must be scary to do a Show HN, so high5 to you, but...what's the appeal of this over a Carrrd, Wix or Squarespace which already has a good UI / drag and drop editor and has all the redundancy, SEO compliance and user access management in-built?

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#53
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Notion) It looks like most of the guidance on Pagespeed for large images, and layout shift due to images. The guidance to fix is to set fixed images sizes for these elements, and to re-encode images into more efficient image formats, at their displayed size instead of their maximum source size. Potion probably doesn't currently know the correct width for an image because they give their users kind of unlim…

Where does adding the ability for Notion to transcode images sit in y'all's backlog? As much as it's not Notion's fault here and an underlying issue of image (re)sizing, it still gives the impression that Notion is slow.

Sorry, but as a rule I try not to make forward looking statements about our plans. We are hiring, though! https://notion.so/jobs

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#54
post #40
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more for existing Notion users that may wish to have a tiny microsite about something. Someone already invested in Notion isn't going to care about self-hosting.

A tiny microsite for $120/year tho.

Two nice coffees per month, not so bad. Can fund it by canceling a rarely-used streaming service.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#55
post #40
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more for existing Notion users that may wish to have a tiny microsite about something. Someone already invested in Notion isn't going to care about self-hosting.

A tiny microsite for $120/year tho.

This. $10 a month isn’t unheard of but when commodity VPS hosting is $5 a month (if not less) and stuff like WordPress.com is $8 a month and Netlify and GitHub Pages exist, I don’t know how broad this market is. Especially when you’re talking about the lock-in imposed by using this sort of thing.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#56

Don't take this the wrong way, it must be scary to do a Show HN, so high5 to you, but...what's the appeal of this over a Carrrd, Wix or Squarespace which already has a good UI / drag and drop editor and has all the redundancy, SEO compliance and user access management in-built?

Hey! Thanks for the question. Potion is really for those that love Notion. Notion is really great for certain kinds of sites. A wiki, help center or those that just want to have their portfolio site through Notion. Pretty powerful to be able to edit your notes and site in the same place. Instead of going back to your website builder where you are rusty and haven't touched for a couple of months.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#57
post #41

Hmm I built something like this on top of Svelte Cloudflare workers API, and the configs controller for the site itself is using a Notion table. The reason I built this to replace a Wordpress site is because the rest of our ecosystem is a bunch of Svelte apps, and with this we could just drop content from Notion straight into our site. We can even use fancy pants things like synced blocks for site-wide announcements,…

yeah, that makes sense. Potion actually recreates all the Notion blocks from scratch and then hosts it statically. Thats how we get around that issue.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#58
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, 42 isn't actually that bad. PageSpeed Insights scores are incredibly strict (that's a good thing) and not at all linear with visitor perception of loading speed. news.ycombinator.com has a 100 score, but if you compare the actual "Lab Data" it's not a massive difference. First Contentful Paint: news.ycombinator.com: 1.3s, potion.so: 2.7s The biggest difference is Time to Interactive: news.ycombinator.co…

The hit to your SEO rankings matters a lot more than the actual load time.

I actively don’t use notion because of how slow it feels. It looks beautiful, but feels bad.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#59

Don't take this the wrong way, it must be scary to do a Show HN, so high5 to you, but...what's the appeal of this over a Carrrd, Wix or Squarespace which already has a good UI / drag and drop editor and has all the redundancy, SEO compliance and user access management in-built?

(I work at Notion, bias etc)

Think about how content of any kind ends up published:

1. Ideate - what do you want to make? Brainstorm, keep notes of ideas. Make plans.

2. Draft - put your ideas down in their native media. Write, paint, etc.

3. Revise, collaborate - polish things up, retouch photos, etc. Loop in your editor.

4. Distribute - publish your creation, so others can get it. Transform it into a form that's sharable. Focus on reach.

A product like like Squarespace is really only concerned with step (4) of the creative process - publishing to the web. So you'll need to do the rest of the steps with other tools; maybe just pencil and paper or maybe Google Docs, and then bring that content into Squarespace for distribution.

But, Notion does (at least a passible job at) all steps in this workflow, especially for text content. People use it for notes, then share privately to collaborate with comments. Publishing is a single switch to make a page public. We're not as fully-featured as a Wix; for example Notion doesn't offer analytics or advertising placement. But since we're pretty good at all the other stuff, it makes sense for people who like Notion to find a way to augment the publishing use-case with something like Potion.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#60
post #45
post #41

Hmm I built something like this on top of Svelte Cloudflare workers API, and the configs controller for the site itself is using a Notion table. The reason I built this to replace a Wordpress site is because the rest of our ecosystem is a bunch of Svelte apps, and with this we could just drop content from Notion straight into our site. We can even use fancy pants things like synced blocks for site-wide announcements,…

Could you use CF KV for this? https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-kv/

See also: https://flareact.com/
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