Creating a stunning personal site on Notion from scratch

Here’s the final product: optemization.com/temirlan

Last Wednesday, I bombed my “How to build a website on Notion” livestream.

It was one of the more embarrassing moments of my life. I barely scrambled through the live build while 159 people watched me say “umm”, “you know” and “right” way too many times. My self-consciousness was exacerbated by the very few chat messages and a dwindling number of active participants. If you attended, I’m sorry you had to witness this.

I bombed because I didn’t prepare enough. The idea was to introduce folks to the mechanics of building a public Notion website and then, actually create a personal portfolio website from scratch. Yes, write the copy and design from nothing, at the same time. Turns out, it’s a shit plan because when I opened an empty Notion page, I panicked and couldn’t flex my brain to come up with anything.

I should have pre-written the copy and at least came up with a design wireframe or mockup beforehand. That’s what I did on the second session, which was better but still sucky due to streaming tech issues. Ten minutes into the talk, I realized that Firefox doesn’t play well with Crowdcast on two desktops, so I had to break up the event to fix that.

Anyway, I still think that the idea of this video is pretty good because it shows how easy and fast it is to build a Notion website, so I re-recorded it here. Take a look and let me know what you think :)

I also mentioned these tools:

Thanks for reading, happy Thanksgiving and ttyl 👋