Monday, 1 August 2022

Super review

There are a myriad of website builders out there. Some can do all and everything, some are made specifically for a special niche such as artists, and some you can even use on your mobile to create your site. This much choice can be overwhelming.

But what when you go about it the other way? Say, look at things you absolutely don’t want to do or have and things you can’t live without? The things you don’t want are perhaps

  • You don’t want to be bothered with traditional options such as WordPress and their endless plugins and themes
  • You don’t have the time to get to grips with something like Webflow that has a learning curve
  • You generally don’t want hassle and hair-pulling with your tool when you’re creating your site or for maintenance

As for what you want,

  • You want to launch a site fast, maybe even within minutes
  • You want a simple, clean, and sure-fire way to have an online presence, maybe even consolidate your presence and showcase your work and projects
  • The site must be fast on all kinds of devices (good for SEO)
  • Want to structure the site, layout, and everything else as you need and not as the tool sees fit
  • Easy maintenance
  • The tool should not break the bank
  • And maybe the tool can slot in seamlessly with your productivity app

Ok, the last point is not an absolute must-have but it can help streamline your work. So, now that you have the criteria for your website, there aren’t so many options left: You can build your web presence with Super made my Notion. You can connect it to a custom domain and password protected specific pages. There are also templates to change the look and feel of your site. So far, so standard.

Pros and cons of Super

Super is a simple website builder by Notion. You can create a website blazingly fast, within minutes even. It comes with themes and is easy to manage. You can use custom domains, password protect pages and don’t need to write any code.

Super is a subscription-based service that you access via your browser. So, all you need is a browser and internet connection and you can work from everywhere. The only maintenance you need to do is to update your content. Everything techy is done for you.

Pros

  • Forever free plan
  • Fair pricing
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to maintain your content

Cons

  • Using a template is more hairy than with a run of the mill website builder

What is Notion?

Notion is a productivity application. It gives you tools to manage projects such as workspaces, notes, databases, Kanban boards, wikis, calendars, and reminders. With it, you can make your own for knowledge management, note-taking, data management, and project management – in short, to get organised and to collaborate. It’s like Evernote and Confluence had an offspring – but on steroids.

Notion workspace

Notion is the hub with which you can create not only systems for knowledge management but also for workflows. Creating and publishing a blog or a site is just a part of it. It’s module-based. Think of it like Lego. You can use its different modules to create something as complex as a CRM or ERP.

Who is Super for?

The first thing to say is that Super isn’t an all-purpose website builder. So, if you want to run an online store, go with the conventional tools like WordPress+Woocommerce or Shopify.

Super is a good place to start for everyone, especially if you’re already using notion. If you’re planning on publishing content – articles and images and videos of your work – on your site, Super makes it easy. In other words, if you’re a blogger or a creative, you’ll like what Super has to offer.

How easy is Super to use?

To get a new site up and running, you basically need the following

  1. Buy your custom domain
  2. Create your (free) Notion account
  3. Create your (free) Super account

You use Notion to put in and organise your content and Super takes your Notion page and makes all that’s needed so that your page looks and behaves like a normal web page and in the end website. This means connecting it to your custom account (you need a paid account) and making some stylistics changes. This is cool, because you can see all your changes done in Notion when you click on the sync button in Super.

Onboarding with Superbot

With Super’s editor, you can change things (like site icon, navigation, etc) around just like when you use a traditional web publishing tool. You even have access to the HTML and CSS source code.

Super’s editor shows you your changes

Since you’re using Notion for your content and Super to display it as a traditional website, your workflow is a bit different:

  1. You create a Notion page, the page you want to make into your website
  2. Click on the share link and toggle on “Share to web”
  3. Change to your Super account and click on “New site and follow the instructions

Both Notion and Super have clean interfaces. You probably need more time to write and compile your content than to publish it.

Design and templates

To customise your site design, you can use a Super template. They can be had for free or for reasonable prices.

Templates can be sorted into free, blog, portfolios, etc

Once you found one that suits your taste, you need to duplicate it and it can take up to 10 minutes.

How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Super?

If you want to run an online store, the easiest is to go the conventional route and use something like WordPress+Woocommerce.

What marketing tools does Super provide?

Super is a layer on top of Notion to make the necessary changes for your Notion page to look and feel like a traditional website. Nonetheless, pages built with Super load blazingly fast, good for SEO. The faster a web page loads, the more search engines prefer it. Super also automatically generates a sitemap.xml and you can change the URL into a pretty, search-engine-friendly URL.

Payment options

Running a store and accepting payment is out of scope for Super.

Security

All websites created with and hosted on Super are encrypted with an SSL certificate, even on the free plan. On the free plan, the URL of your site will be something like your-project-name.super.site. If you want to have a custom domain, you need to upgrade to a paid account, then SSL is automatically added to your site.

Customer support

Super itself is really easy to use. You’re probably going to have more questions when using Notion. Still, when you hit a wall, you can chat with the support team of Super or trawl its knowledge base.

Pricing

Both Super and Notion have a free plan so that you can get to grips with it before committing. If you don’t want Super’s branding or a free domain, you can upgrade your account.

A subscription will cost you $12 a month and you’ll get among others custom domains

Is Super the right solution for you?

If you’re already using Notion, it’s a no-brainer to publish your website with Super. The only downside is that you can’t run an online store with it.

If you already have a website running but are regularly pulling your hair because you need to take care of plugins, integrations, and whatnot, using Notion+Super will save you time and hassle.

If your website is running smoothly and only has hiccups here and there, don’t touch a running system! Your time is (probably) better spent on other tasks such as marketing.



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