The former developer in me feels a need to state upfront that Notion is not an ideal web serving layer. If you are trying to do something enterprise grade, you should probably use a different approach.
That said, for anything less than that, using Notion and potentially Potion as an addition is quite powerful. Despite some downsides, the ease of formatting and creating content in Notion is a huge positive. That is largely why we went with Notion and Potion as the serving layer for the Human Optimization Project (this site, in case you didn't know)!
The Hop homepage - built in Notion and served directly to the web
The basics of this are pretty simple: Notion already allows you to make a page public to the web via the Share button in the top right. If you are on a paid plan, this can be done through a domain like *https://yourname.notion.site/yourpage*.
This works really well for one-off things. You can allow (or prohibit) editing and/or comments, and allow search engine indexing or the ability to duplicate a page to their own Notion. So you can also use it to host a static/semi-static page as a resource of blog post of some kind.
As you'll soon discover, there are several key limitations to what Notion sharing provides. Thankfully, the **Potion** team has started to build a solution to address these! Namely, potion enables you to:
There are probably a few more differentiators that I am forgetting, but you get the idea. While the site will still "look" like a Notion side, it is more like a website now, with links taking you instantly to other parts of the site and not having any Notion functionality if someone is logged in, et cetera.
One perk of this is that drafts for content can be kept in the same database as the shared and published content. So long as all of your first views on a database contain a filter, say "page status must be published", then drafts will be inaccessible to any visitors to your site. Thus publishing your content becomes a one-click exercise, and doesn't involve moving anything from one place to another.
But wait, there's more! Another key aspect to any website is forms! Everybody loves forms, right?
Maybe not, but they are very helpful for gathering contact info or any other information from your users. Fortunately, we now have Tally! Tally provides (free) ability to create easy-to-use forms that can be embedded in Notion and integrated with it to sync that data right back to Notion!
Speaking of: now would be a great time to sign up for our monthly updates!
A free & easy-to-read once-per-month e-mail highlighting anything new from Hop!
https://tally.so/embed/wgAKKm?hideTitle=1
So the various sign-up and contact forms you'll see around our site are all made with Tally. And as soon as you fill out your information, they add an entry into another (private) table within our Notion environment. It lists the name and e-mail tied to the form that it came from and any additional feedback for forms that allow this.