See my first article on the announcement of Notion sites: https://inleo.io/@walterjay/notion-released-custom-sites-this-week-7sw
Today I completed the switch from my third party provider simple.ink which was hosting the redirection between my domain walterjay.fr to my public Notion page with via its notion URL.
Simple ink acted as a website builder and was adding a layer on top of the Notion page basically using it as a database.
The solution was offering a few advance features like password protected pages and the ability to have more websites connected. I have used the service for months and it worked fine for me during that time.
The only reason I switched was because I wanted to remove that third party and have the hosting of the page happing all within Notion, since they decided to run this new feature I expect them to expand the service in the coming years.
Notion site is actually more expensive
I was paying the previous service $19 a month and I thought I might save if switching to notion natively as I heard of price as low as $8 a month.
unfortunately this isn't the whole truth, in order to have access to one custom domain natively within the Notion app, you actually need to be a Notion Plus member which set me back 114€ + taxes.
Only after the upgrade you are eligible to add a custom domain, this is where the other cost is coming in, I am paying an additional 90€ + taxes just to connect a website I own (not counting the cost of keeping the domain)
This service is only valid for one subdomain which is mandatory, I had to use www.walterjay.fr in order for it to work in Notion compare to having my main page on root of the domain. The later walterjay.fr doesn't work anymore and I actually have to create another redirection in order to redirect traffic to www.
This is on top of the Notion Plus subscription
Notion Plus, 5 notion domain and 1 custom domain
In order to add/create a new domain, you can go to the page you have published via Notion and then site settings and managed all sites in order to get to the view below.
This view will allow you to select which Notion home page you want to assign to which domain. For me I simply move use the content from my page and assigned it to my custom domain.
DNS
Unfortunately I didn't take any screenshot during this process but I did have to create a new CNAME redirection to Notion 
Also you have to add a TXT entry in order for Notion to verify ownership which I won't post for security reasons. All instructions are straightforward and given to you after you have paid for the connection.
If you have never done a DNS redirection, you can find a lot of documentation online on how to do it. If you need help you can also contact me in the comments.
After you added all the information, you will need to click on the verify button on Notion, apparently it can take up to 10 mins, for me it was less then that. After that time you will see that the status on Notion will switch from pending to Live.
You can now connect to your new website hosted on Notion and natively connected to your DNS provider without a third party.
Some things that could be improved
It seems like some features have been lost compared to using simple ink,
- The favicon is not showing properly even when selected and uploaded on Notion, stills shows the Notion logo on safari and chrome(on mobile)
- The inbuilt navigation menu you can activate on the top right only works with link to other Notion pages at the time and not with external one. I wanted to connect to my gumroad shop but couldn't. Not a big deal because you can get around by doing your own menu on the actual page.
- On mobile the navigation menu is hidden, you have to click on the search icon to see the other pages
- No advance features on top of the page
- You can't code your own feature or apply themes
Since this is the first public release of the software, I really believe that Notion will improve sites natively and those problems might not be there down the road, or they might even create a super nice website builder in order to compete directly with other services.
SEO
From the site publish option you can easily edit your SEO content and change the preview of the website manually. I haven't turn that on yet but it will be useful later when I get my products and services out to work a bit on the SEO keywords for better indexing on Google.
Bonus: Google analytics and SSL
Took me about 10 mins to setup google analytics from a new account and adding the ID back into Notion. We will see in the future if it does work like that. Anyway it was a painless process to get that going.
For an added bonus, Notion does provide automatically an SSL certificate to the newly created subdomain www.walterjay.fr
Overall it seems way faster in terms of load time, the navigation is smoother as well between internal page I think.
I would recommend Notion if you want to publish a fast website with low tech maintenance. You can also use the app just for productivity which is the main product, website is a nice to have feature.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha