Website Building and Web Hosting Tools

#Amusing Tools# , #ECOS

Super ⚡️

I host my websites with Super.so, which makes it easy to make Notion.so pages into websites.

Super works well and I recommend it. It has limited functionality compared with something like Wordpress, but it is much easier to use and accomplishes what I need.

There are many great Super templates with pre-made CSS code on the Super website and the Super Builder has many helpful tools too. I downloaded some Super templates and chatted with their support to modify the CSS code to make it look better. These work well, but are not necessary and you can set up a site that looks great very quickly with Super.

Github Pages vs Super

I’m planning to start many websites that are hosted by GitHub Pages. Eventually, I might move most or all websites that I’m building to this system.

Github Pages are more a bit more complex than Super and require some basic knowledge of GitHub. You can learn most of the basic knowledge of GitHub needed for Pages in an excellent series on YouTube called GitHub for Poets.

GitHub Pages works with static pages which have less functionality than dynamic pages like Wordpress, but static pages work for my goals and have many advantages. GitHub Pages are very helpful in how they make the website more composable and collaborative than Super.

Super is a bit locked into the Notion ecosystem (which has many benefits), but the files aren’t as portable and it doesn’t have the collaborative features of GitHub. GitHub makes it easy to work with HTML files and many helpful collaborative features. Super also has powerful collaboration features native to Notion and some export functionality for portable files, but it does not have as many collaborative or composable features as GitHub Pages. GitHub pages is also free, whereas Super costs 12 dollars per month.

Sorry if this is TMI, some of this might not be very relevant for your site but this is my experience and I figured it might be helpful to share with you.

Squarespace, Wordpress, and Webflow

I’ve also used Squarespace a few years ago which worked very well, but did require some troubleshooting and was also limiting in features.

I also looked into Wordpress and Webflow for while a few years back after feeling limited by Squarespace. There are hosting services like Wordpress dot org and Bluehost for these. Webflow seems particularly interesting because they have a big focus on no-code and the Wordpress Gutenberg also seemed to be making Wordpress easier to use. From what I remember, these tools did not have collaborative features like Super or Github Pages.

Wordpress and Webflow are very powerful, but are much more complicated. I invested many hours learning these tools but have not learned enough to build any useful sites with them.

Summary

Overall, I’ve found Super to work much better than Squarespace because Notion+Super is a great combo that makes it very simple and quite flexible. I’m also a big fan of Notion and have been using it for a while, so that might be some reason for bias.

I think GitHub Pages will probably be best for most sites I’m building in the longer run, but I’m not able to make Github Pages look sufficiently great yet because I’m not very competent with HTML or CSS code. I’m planning to hire a web dev to help with this at some point, but Super has been sufficient and much easier to set up for now with Notion + Super templates. Overall Super works very well.

Hope the site building goes great! I’m looking forward to seeing it!

Feel free to ask any questions 🙂

Note: This is a work in progress and may be updated in the future to provide the most helpful information & best reading experiences possible.