emilybuilds

Notes / Website 2025

Original 2025 post

Building My AI Product Portfolio Site with Notion + Super

· from EXP-001 emilybuilds on Notion + Super

As a first step in creating a portfolio of AI product experiments, I launched emilybuilds.ai - a simple, expandable site to showcase my work.

It’s not particularly pretty. It’s not even coded (which still feels slightly cheat-y for something this minimal). But it’s live, easy to update, and took about 2 hours to get live.

This might be the least technical blog I’ll write here (I hope so anyway!) — but here’s how I did it, what I learned, and some tips for anyone thinking of doing the same.

The Stack

Why Notion + Super?

Because I didn’t want to spend time I should be using to explore AI tooling fighting with layout bugs (and I never was any good at Front End).

Slightly overwhelmed by choice of tools, I asked ChatGPT for a recommendation, and while it suggested options like Framer, I landed on Notion and Super because:

  • I already use Notion
  • It’s fast, flexible, and good enough for now
  • It more like a workspace, than something I need to maintain as a finished artefact
  • I can always rebuild it properly when I need to

Key Setup Steps

1. Buy a domain

I used Namecheap because it was the cheapest.

I picked:

  • emilybuilds.ai — seemed unusual, playful and relevant to AI
  • emilysas.com — more generic, and useful for custom email setup (NB. I’ve not yet set up this site)

2. Set up Super

Go to Super.so, create a site, and paste in your public Notion homepage. (Make sure it's shared and published correctly — this tripped me up.)

Then:

  • Assign slugs for each page (/projects, /about, etc.)
  • Tweak your design and layout
  • Connect your domain by editing DNS settings on Namecheap
  • Add a Google Analytics tag if you want this

3. Fix navigation + hidden pages

This nonsense took the longest. Some things to know:

  • Use absolute links with slugs like /resources/ai-native-products

    (Notion will try to overwrite these — don’t let it)

  • Breadcrumb navigation and page links at the bottom of pages can be hidden via Super’s Design settings (wish I’d gone straight to google to discover this)

  • Despite what ChatGPT told me, you cannot just delete subpages without deleting the actual page — you’ll need to use Super’s “hide Notion page links” option instead

What I Learned

  • Super is powerful but opinionated and doesn’t always play nicely with Notion’s own navigation or layout logic
  • DNS can take a while to propagate so don’t panic (like I did) if your domain takes a bit of time to update
  • Linking between pages is easiest if you use slugs but this can be awkward and will break nav functionality in Notion.
  • Design limitations can be annoying and it makes it look a bit basic, but it seems a reasonable trade off for getting the most basic part of my portfolio project live in under 2 hours.

As part of making this site more useful and interactive, I added a way for visitors to sign up for updates.

I used:

  • Tally to capture names and email addresses
  • Zapier + Airtable to manage submissions behind the scenes
  • A plan to use SMTP via Namecheap for sending welcome emails

…which didn’t go quite to plan initially as I ran into authentication issues (ECONNRESET, TLS confusion, SMTP setup headaches) (see this post for more details).

Through a bit of trial and error, I’ve now connected the signup form to the automated email flow and everything works smoothly. Users who opt in now receive a welcome email, and their record is tagged in Airtable so I can track engagement over time.

If you've used these tools and have any tips on how I can improve the look and feel of the site, I’d love to hear about it

Final Thoughts

I was very tempted to build the site from scratch — I prefer the control that comes with code. But realistically, that would’ve meant days of fussing with styling and layout instead of focusing on what matters - learning new skills rather than brushing up on rusty ones.

The no-code approach had its frustrations such as odd slug behaviour, hidden page quirks, styling limitations etc, but it still saved me time. And honestly, I probably spent less time dealing with Super’s weirdness than I would’ve wrestling with flexbox.

It’s live. It works. It looks OK-ish. But importantly it’s easy to iterate on, so I can write this blog post and get it live pretty instantaneously.

When I get tired of paying Super £16/month (ouch!), I’ll code it up properly.