(Part 3 – how Notion changes the game when it comes to easily creating flexible, data-rich web page)
The best way to learn a tool is to use it to solve an actual problem.
I’d given Notion a try a couple of times when it was much newer. When they dropped an important limitation on the free plan, I tried it once again, but I still didn’t really get it. More recently, I read, this time in detail, an extraordinary profile of Marie Poulin, who uses Notion to organise several aspects of her life, capturing and displaying detailed personal data. It’s at that point that something clicked. Everything was a database, and the entire proposition of Notion was displaying that data in any number of different ways.
Now I have been working with a friend to create a website and a community around coffee – specifically, people in India who brew their own coffee. The hypothesis is that there are hundreds of such people across the country not, but there’s no destination for all of them to share their journeys, experiences, questions. We wanted to start by sharing our own favourite roasts, cafes, brew methods, roasters, articles, and take it from there. Content → Community → Commerce, like we have seen before in our series on Linear Commerce.
I defaulted to WordPress for this project. I already pay for hosting for this site and have WordPress set up. The idea was to turn it into a multi-site installation and have the domain point to the coffee site’s wordpress. This was exactly what I did over oneweekend. We had written content for the site’s About page, so that went up. And stalled. It wasn’t simple to create a gallery of the roasts, roasters and brew methods that I had wanted us to get started with. Even with Elementor and its Gallery widget – it was just too clunky.
That was where I was at when I re-read the Poulin article. It took me a single weekend on Notion and fewer hours than I had spent on WordPress to create exactly what I had wanted. Not just the setup – all the content too.
This is the Notion site as it stands today. It’s an early public draft and we work on it nearly every day. Notion makes it simple to add a lot of data easily. Because there’s no edit mode, any changes we make to content or layout are available to the public immediately.
(Part 5 – What’s the catch?)