Table2Site

Table2Site is a website builder that turns an Airtable base into a live website. Its pages carry the line "Convert your airtable base to a website", and the whole product follows from it: your data and layout instructions live in Airtable tables, and the Table2Site app renders them as a site on its own hosting. It is for founders, freelancers and small teams who already organize content in Airtable and would rather edit rows than learn a page editor.

What you build and how

You do not design pages on a canvas. You fill in 2 Airtable tables, and the site is generated from them. The getting-started guide says an Airtable base needs 2 mandatory tables, settings and content. The settings table holds site-wide choices, from the main menu to the MailChimp API key. The content table holds the pages and their content. The demo bases and the blank base the company provides already contain both tables with the right column headings.

The setup takes 4 steps. First you copy a base into your own Airtable account: a blank base, or one of 3 demo websites. Second, in the Table2Site app you create a site by entering your Airtable base ID, which the guide says you find at airtable.com/api/, and a website slug, a unique ID that becomes part of your address at table2site.com/site/your-slug. Pro users also see a custom domain field, where you enter the domain without http or www. Third, you build: each setting is a record with a setting ID and a value, and each record in the content table becomes a section of the website. Fourth, you turn dev mode off. While you build, dev mode keeps data uncached so every Airtable edit shows immediately, and the guide says to switch it off when you finish so the site data is cached on Table2Site's servers. Leave it on and you risk timeouts on the Airtable API, because your rate limits are exceeded.

A content row has an Id, which you can use to link to that section from the main menu, a Type chosen from a dropdown, a text color, a background color, a title and a text, an Options column holding the settings each type accepts, and a Page column. Home is the built-in index page; any other page is created simply by giving it a name in that column and adding content to it. The content types are the product's vocabulary, and the content types guide lists these:

• Hero, a banner at the top with a background image, title, text and navigation.
• Centered text, which centers a title and text in the middle of the page.
• Features, which shows a number of features.
• Image left, text right, and Image right, text left, 2-column sections.
• Tile view, which shows data as cards, grid or tiles, with filters you can add.
• Footer, a simple page footer.
• Contact form, which displays a contact form.
• Iframe, to display anything external.
• List view, which shows data in a list design, also with filters.
• Map, which displays an OpenStreetMap with markers, each able to carry a popup with extra information.
• Newsletter subscription, which adds a section that signs people up to your MailChimp email list.

Table2Site marks each type as either Free and premium, or Premium only. Hero, Centered text, Features, both image sections, Tile view and Footer are Free and premium. Contact form, Iframe, List view, Map and Newsletter subscription are Premium.

The settings table covers branding and behavior. Free settings include a logo, with a default width of 45px, a favicon, which falls back to your logo when unset, a base font size, a font family that defaults to Open Sans and accepts any Google font, a title font and weight (bold, 300, 400, 600 or 700), button colors, right-to-left support, the main menu shown in the hero, and the browser-tab title. The Pro settings add a meta title and image for Facebook shares and Twitter cards, an SEO meta description, a Google Tag Manager ID, a Google Analytics ID, custom CSS, a Crisp live chat ID, a MailChimp API key and list ID, a Calendly widget with its link, bubble text ("Make an appointment" by default) and color, a MapBox token for maps, and a username and password that password-protect the whole site. The Google Tag Manager setting is also the documented route for adding third-party scripts or HTML.

For a visitor, the result is a page of stacked sections in the order of your content rows. The main menu setting takes entries written as a label and an anchor, and the example in the settings guide is "Contact: #contact", which jumps to the section whose Id is contact. A Tile view section shows your records as cards, and a visitor can narrow them with the filters you add. A Map section places your records as OpenStreetMap markers, and a popup on a marker shows the extra information you stored with it. If you have a Calendly link, the Pro widget setting displays your Calendly widget on the site, and the Crisp setting adds live chat.

Documentation also covers adding multiple pages, adding options to content, enriching content with shortcodes, adding more details to list and grid items, connecting a custom domain and adding third-party scripts. Support is a chat on the site, and the navigation links a roadmap and examples.

Plans and limits

The documentation splits every feature into Free and Pro (or premium), and prices sit on a separate pricing page. The settings guide notes that every setting is optional and has a default, so you only fill in the ones you need. A free site lives at its table2site.com/site address and can use the hero, centered text, features, image sections, tile view and footer, plus the logo, favicon, fonts, button colors, right-to-left reading and the main menu. A custom domain is a Pro feature, and Pro also holds the social share and SEO meta fields, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, custom CSS, Crisp live chat, the MailChimp newsletter, Calendly, MapBox, password protection, and the contact form, iframe, list view and map sections.

Who it suits and who it does not

Table2Site suits someone whose content already lives in an Airtable base and changes often. A small business could publish a catalog, a person could run a portfolio, and an organizer could show a list of places on a map, and in each case an edit in Airtable is an edit on the site. The free section types are enough for a one-page presence with a hero, feature blocks, a tile gallery with filters and a footer.

The trade-offs are plain. Airtable is the only data source the pages describe, so the product has no use without it. Layout comes from the section types and the settings list, and anything beyond that needs custom CSS, a Pro feature, and some CSS knowledge. A contact form, map, list view or newsletter box needs the premium tier. A busy site also has to stay out of dev mode, because uncached sites lean on Airtable's API rate limits.