In the interest of helping people understand what is possible, I present an example of using chat-based AI with Elements (not the API version, but the MCP version).
First, here’s the site: https://bythompress.com. The buttons are not yet hooked up, and this is just a preview I’m revealing to help you understand what the AI did.
Now for the main course: the following is the full chat session that created it.
byThom ZConnect — Landing Page Build Session
A chat session with Claude, working in RapidWeaver Elements — September 16–18, 2026
User
In Elements: Create a single landing page for a new app that I’m launching, called byThom ZConnect. This iOS application connects Nikon Z System cameras to your mobile device, allowing for simple, convenient, and quick downloading of images, which then can be sent on via the app to Photos, Files, Messages, and Mail.
Claude
Happy to build this in Elements — a landing page for ZConnect sounds like a fun one. Before I start adding pages and components, a few quick questions so I get the structure and look right on the first pass:
- Where should I build this? — New page in my open project / Brand-new Elements project
- What’s the launch status / main call-to-action? — Live, App Store link / Pre-launch, email signup / Coming soon, no CTA yet
- Visual direction? — Dark, photography-forward / Light & minimal (Apple-style) / Match my existing site design
User
Where should I build this? — Brand-new Elements project What’s the launch status / main call-to-action? — Live — App Store link Visual direction? — Dark, photography-forward
Claude
[Creates a new Elements project; surveys Smart Templates; sets site title and dark-mode settings; builds the page from six templates with custom copy; applies always-dark styling in two passes; verifies the render; records everything in project memory.]
Your ZConnect landing page is built in a new Elements project. Here’s what’s on the page, top to bottom: a dark hero with the byThom ZConnect wordmark, an amber “Get the app” nav button, the headline “Your Z System images. On your phone. Fast.”, and a primary App Store button; a four-step “How it works” strip (Connect → Browse → Download → Send on); a six-item feature grid (Simple, Quick, To Photos, To Files, Messages and Mail, Made for Nikon Z); a compatibility section with a checklist; an amber closing CTA (“Stop emailing yourself photos. Get ZConnect.”); and a minimal footer with the Nikon trademark disclaimer.
For the dark, photography-forward look, I didn’t rely on the visitor’s system appearance — every section background is forced to near-black (#0a0a0a) in both light and dark modes, with white/gray text and a single Nikon-ish amber (#fabc00) reserved for the eyebrow label and primary buttons. The copy is written plain and direct, photographer-to-photographer, no marketing fluff.
A few things I deliberately left for you, since I didn’t want to invent facts or links:
- App Store URL — paste your real link into the four download buttons (hero, compatibility, CTA, and the navbar “Get the app”). I didn’t want to fabricate one.
- Images — the hero and compatibility sections still show template placeholder photos; swap in app screenshots or a camera-plus-iPhone shot.
- Compatibility claims — I kept them generic (“Full-frame Nikon Z bodies,” “iPhone and iPad”); tighten those to your actual supported bodies and iOS version.
- Icons — the step and feature icons are template defaults with blue fills; you may want amber replacements.
All of this is logged in the project’s backlog and journal in Elements, so a future session will pick up right where this left off. Want me to tackle any of those next — for example, if you give me the App Store link I can wire up all four buttons?
User
I’ve made some edits of text. We now need to add a FAQ section.
Claude
[Adds the FAQ Accordion Smart Template, positions it between the compatibility section and closing CTA, writes seven Q&As, and restyles it to match the dark treatment.]
The FAQ section is in, sitting between the compatibility section and the closing amber CTA. It uses the accordion template (one question open at a time, plus-icon toggles) and matches the rest of the page: near-black section background, a slightly lighter card wrapping the accordion, white questions, gray answers, and the amber accent on the “FAQ” eyebrow. The last item carries an amber “View on the App Store” button.
The seven questions cover which cameras it works with, whether an internet connection is needed, whether images get altered, where downloads go, raw/NEF support, how it differs from Nikon’s own app, and pricing. Two of those answers I deliberately hedged because I don’t know the facts: the NEF answer points to the App Store listing for file-format details, and the pricing answer just defers to the listing. If you tell me whether ZConnect handles NEF/HEIF and what the price is, I’ll write those answers properly. Same goes for the “different from Nikon’s app” answer if you want it sharper.
I also didn’t touch any of the text you edited elsewhere on the page — and I’ve noted in the project memory that your live copy is the source of truth going forward. One small thing to eyeball in preview: the accordion’s plus/× toggle icon comes from the template and may need a color tweak against the dark cards.
User
I’ve replaced the SVGs in the Content: Horizontal Icon List section with images. Can we put a background behind those similar to what’s up at the top of the site (some sort of dark graduation).
Claude
[Reads the current page structure to find the user’s image swaps, then applies a dark vertical gradient to the four step-image holder boxes.]
Done. Each of the four step-image boxes in the “How it works” section now has a dark vertical gradient instead of the template’s solid white/slate fill: it starts at a dark gray (#262626) at the top and fades down into the same near-black (#0a0a0a) as the section behind it, in both light and dark modes. The effect is that each image sits on a subtly lifted dark plate whose bottom edge dissolves into the page — the same gallery-in-a-dark-room feel as the top of the site. The boxes keep their rounded corners and padding, so your images get a little breathing room inside the gradient.
If you’d like it more pronounced, I can start the gradient lighter (#404040), run it diagonally (top-left to bottom-right) for a lit-from-above look, or add a faint 1px gray border to define the card edges. Just say which direction to push it.
One thing I noticed while reading the page: two of your FAQ answers (“Where do downloaded images go?” and the pricing answer) refer to “byThom Ingest” rather than ZConnect — flagging it in case that’s a leftover from an earlier name rather than intentional. Happy to swap those to ZConnect if you want.
User
Good catch. I’ll fix the naming. Yes, increase the gradient and make it diagonal. Also, in the Features: Clean Grid I removed the SVG icons, but I’m not sure why the items so far apart. I like a Spacing of 2, max 8.
Claude
[Strengthens the gradient and makes it diagonal; adjusts the features grid gaps and removes leftover icon margins.]
Both changes are in.
The four step-image boxes now run diagonally (top-left to bottom-right) and start noticeably lighter — #404040 fading down to the page’s #0a0a0a — so the lit-corner effect reads more clearly against the dark section.
For the features grid, the extra distance was coming from two places. The grid’s gap was set to 10, jumping to 16 vertically on tablet and up — I’ve brought that to your preference: spacing of 2 on mobile, 8 from the md breakpoint up. But the bigger culprit was a leftover from the icons you deleted: each feature title carried a top margin of 5 that originally separated it from the icon badge above. With the icons gone, that margin was just dead air at the top of every card, so I zeroed it while keeping the small gap between each title and its paragraph. The cards should now sit as a tight, scannable grid.
Take a look in preview — if 8 still feels roomy at desktop widths I can drop the md+ gap to 6, or tighten just the vertical axis.
User
I’ve moved the SVGs to resources/svgs instead of just resources. Please note. Images will be in a resources/images folder, and svgs in resources/svgs. Also, Apple has an SVG for download on the app store that should be used where you’re using buttons.
Claude
[Finds the Apple badge the user imported into resources/svgs; checks the SVG component’s capabilities; replaces all four App Store text buttons with the badge; records the folder convention in project memory.]
All set. The four “Download on the App Store” text buttons — hero, compatibility section, the amber closing CTA, and the FAQ’s pricing item — are gone, replaced with your Apple badge SVG. The badges render at 160px wide in the three main spots and a bit smaller (128px) inside the FAQ card, and they scale up slightly on hover so they read as clickable. The black badge sits nicely on the dark sections and provides good contrast on the amber CTA card.
I’ve also recorded your resource convention in the project memory — images in resources/images/, SVGs in resources/svgs/ — so future sessions will file new resources accordingly and won’t reintroduce text buttons for download CTAs.
Two housekeeping notes from scanning your resources: meeting-bw.jpg (the old hero placeholder, now unused) ended up inside the svgs folder, and macbook-guy.jpg — still used by the compatibility section — sits at the resources root rather than in images. You may want to tidy those in the app.
The badges still need their destination: when you have the App Store URL, give it to me and I’ll set the link on all four in one pass (and the navbar’s “Get the app” button too, which I left as a small amber text button since a full badge would overwhelm the nav — happy to swap it if you’d rather have the badge there as well).
User
Apple’s SVGs needed Fill removed. “See how it works” button doesn’t scroll to that section.
Claude
[Searches Elements’ docs for the anchor mechanism; discovers the Inspector’s Advanced → ID field isn’t writable via automation after several attempts; works around it with a custom anchor component; sets Fill to none on all badges; files a field report about the gap.]
Both fixed.
On the badges: Fill is now explicitly off on all four badge SVGs, so Apple’s own black-and-white artwork renders untouched. I’ve also noted in the project memory that brand/multi-color SVGs should always have Fill disabled when placed — so this won’t recur when future sessions add SVGs.
On the scroll: the Inspector’s Advanced → ID field (Elements’ normal way to create anchor targets) turns out not to be writable through the automation interface — I tried every plausible property name and filed a field report about the gap. The workaround is clean, though: I created a one-line custom component called “Anchor: How It Works” that renders an invisible <div id="how-it-works"> with a bit of scroll-margin so the section doesn’t land flush against the viewport top, dropped it immediately above the How section, and pointed the “See how it works” button at #how-it-works (same tab). Elements ships with smooth scrolling enabled site-wide, so the button should now glide down to the section.
Give it a try in preview. If the section lands too high or too low relative to the top of the screen, tell me and I’ll adjust the anchor’s scroll offset — and if you ever add a sticky nav, that offset will need increasing to compensate.
User
Scroll to anchor doesn’t work. Meanwhile, when you hover over the first Download at App Store button you get a black graduated background replacement under the element.
Claude
[Inspects the button and badge properties to diagnose both issues.]
Found both culprits. The button’s stored link kept the control’s default “open in new window” behavior — so the click was trying to open a new tab instead of scrolling the current page. And the badge’s hover-scale is what’s triggering that dark artifact: scaling promotes the SVG to its own compositing layer, which forces the hero’s blurred background disc behind it to repaint — that’s the “black graduation” you’re seeing under the element. The clean fix is to drop the hover transform entirely.
[Applies both fixes.]
Both should behave now.
For the scroll: the link itself was fine, but Elements’ link control defaults to “open in new window,” and my explicit override apparently didn’t take on the first pass — so clicking was attempting to open #how-it-works in a new tab (which browsers often block or which just looks like nothing happened). I’ve re-set the link with new-window explicitly off, so the click stays on the page and smooth-scrolls to the anchor above the How section.
For the badge: the hover scale-up I’d added was the problem. Scaling an element promotes it onto its own GPU compositing layer, and since the hero badge sits over that blurred decorative disc in the hero background, the repaint showed up as a dark gradient patch beneath the badge. I’ve removed the hover transform (and its transition) from all four badges rather than just the hero one, since the CTA badge sits over the amber card and could have shown a similar artifact. The badges are now static; the cursor change from the link still signals they’re clickable. If you’d like some hover feedback back, a slight opacity dim on hover doesn’t trigger the same repaint problem — say the word and I’ll add it.
Test the “See how it works” button in preview once more. If it still won’t scroll there specifically (but works in an exported/published site), that would point to preview-mode hash handling rather than the page itself — worth one check in an actual browser export before we chase it further.
User
The SVG in the top bar should be replaced by the app’s icon, which is in resources/images and titled bythom-zconnect-appicon.png.
See how it works text still doesn’t scroll. No indication that it is a live button. However, don’t do anything there yet as I’m thinking about adding a video about it works. Maybe we can pop up the video when the user clicks on that.
Claude
[Swaps both the desktop and mobile navbar logos for the app icon; leaves the button untouched and logs the video-modal idea.]
The navbar now shows your app icon. I swapped it in two places: the desktop logo, where the template’s rotated-diamond placeholder sat next to the wordmark (the icon now sits there at 40px with slightly rounded corners, iOS-style), and the mobile logo, which was still showing the template’s Elements SVG. Both point at images/bythom-zconnect-appicon.png, so if you ever update the icon file, both spots update together.
And understood on “See how it works” — I’ve left it completely alone and parked it in the project backlog so we don’t lose the thread. For what it’s worth, the video popup idea is a good fit for what Elements gives us: there’s a Modal component (with a Modal Close) and a Video component, so the pattern would be the button opening an overlay with the video playing inside, on the dark page — no navigation, no scrolling involved, and it sidesteps the anchor problem entirely. It would also solve your “no indication it’s live” complaint, since opening a modal is unmistakable feedback. When you’ve decided and have the video file (drop it into a resources/videos/ folder if you want to extend your convention), tell me and I’ll wire it up — button, modal, close control, and dark styling to match. If you instead decide to stick with the scroll, the next diagnostic step would be checking whether the anchor works in an exported site versus Elements preview, which would tell us whether it’s the page or the preview environment.
User
I need to re-edit the video eventually, but zconnect.mp4 is now in the resources/video folder. Note that it is a vertical video.
Claude
[Builds the modal: dark panel, close control, and a video player sized 9:16 at 70% viewport height, loaded with zconnect.mp4 and a splash-screenshot poster. Discovers the video source property by probing, but can’t find a way to wire the button to the modal via automation.]
The video modal is built and loaded with zconnect.mp4. Since it’s a vertical video, I set the player to a 9:16 aspect ratio capped at 70% of the viewport height, so the whole phone-shaped frame fits on screen without scrolling, portrait or desktop. It sits centered in a dark rounded panel (matching your card styling) with a Modal Close control at the top, and I gave it your splash screenshot as the poster frame so it doesn’t open as a black rectangle before playback. When you re-edit the video later, just replace zconnect.mp4 in the resources — the modal picks up the new file automatically, nothing to rewire.
One step needs your hands in the app, and I want to be straight about why: connecting a button to a modal is done through the Link panel’s “Modal” target type, and that particular link type isn’t reachable through the automation interface (it only speaks URL/page/anchor/resource links — I’ve noted this in the field-report log along with the Advanced ID gap). So: select the hero’s “See how it works” button, open its Link control, and choose Link → Modal → the modal I just added. That replaces the dead #how-it-works text link currently on it, which likely also explains why the anchor never fired — the plain-text link type may not render as a real navigable href in the core button, something the modal approach makes moot.
Once you’ve wired it and confirmed the popup works, tell me and I’ll clean up the leftovers: the invisible anchor div and its custom component, which will be orphaned at that point. And if you want the button itself to look more alive, I can add a hover state (background lighten or an amber border) that won’t trigger the compositing artifact we hit on the badges.
User
I do like my buttons to hover at 103%. However, I’m not sure what you mean by “Modal” target type. I find no reference to that.
Claude
Fair challenge — I asserted that from the docs’ vague “trigger from buttons” line, and if the Link panel doesn’t show it, I was wrong about the mechanism. The good news: Realmac open-sourced the core components on GitHub, so I can read the actual Modal implementation and find out exactly how it’s triggered.
[Clones the open-source RWElementsCorePack and reads the Modal component’s source.]
Mystery solved, and I was wrong earlier — sorry for sending you hunting for a link type that doesn’t exist. Reading the Modal’s actual source code in Realmac’s open-source core pack cleared it up: a modal isn’t opened by a link at all. The modal component renders an invisible Trigger slot inline wherever the modal sits, and clicking anything placed inside that slot dispatches the open event; the dialog overlay itself is teleported to the end of the page regardless.
So I’ve wired it properly: the modal now lives in the hero’s button row, right where the old button stood, and your “See how it works” button has been moved inside the modal’s Trigger slot. Clicking it should now open the video overlay. I also cleared the dead #how-it-works link from the button and — since the button previously had a fully transparent background, part of why it didn’t read as live — raised its dark background to full opacity so it looks like a real secondary button next to the badge.
Your 103% hover is now the house standard: applied to “See how it works” and the navbar’s “Get the app,” with the transition limited to transform only, and recorded in the project’s visual style guide so it’s applied to any future buttons automatically. I deliberately left the App Store badges static, since hover scaling is exactly what produced that black gradient artifact over the hero’s blurred backdrop — if you want the badges at 103% too, I can try it with the tighter transition and we’ll see if the artifact stays away.
One leftover: the “Anchor: How It Works” custom component in your library is now orphaned (I noticed you’d already deleted its instance from the page). Want me to remove it from the component library, or keep it around in case you want scroll anchors elsewhere later?
User
Okay, the modal video works. However, now when the video starts playing we only see a horizontal swath across the middle. It’s playing as 16:9 within 9:16.
Claude
[Reads the Video component’s source and finds the inner player element hard-codes a 16:9 aspect regardless of settings; builds a scoped CSS override as a custom component.]
Fixed. The override forces the player inside the modal to honor the 9:16 frame — full width and height of its wrapper with cover fit — instead of the baked-in 16:9. It’s injected once into the page head via a “Vertical Video Fix” custom component sitting invisibly inside the modal panel, and it’s scoped to videos inside modals only, so nothing else on the page (like a future landscape video section) inherits it.
Open the modal again and the video should now fill the tall frame edge to edge. Worth knowing for the future: this is a quirk of the core Video component, not anything you did — it assumes landscape footage and hard-codes 16:9 on the actual player element, with the aspect-ratio control only shaping the outer box. I’ve logged that in the project’s concerns file, so if Realmac fixes it upstream we can remove the override, and if you ever add a landscape video in another modal, we’ll need to tighten the CSS scoping at that point.
One check when you look: with cover fit, if your edit’s frame isn’t exactly 9:16 there’ll be a slight crop at the edges. If you’d rather letterbox than crop (show every pixel with thin bars instead), say so and I’ll flip it to contain.
User
Verified working. Putting project aside for today.
Claude
Great — glad it’s all verified. I’ve logged the session in the project journal, so when you pick this back up (today, next week, whenever), the next session will know exactly where things stand.
For your own mental checklist, what’s still open: the App Store URL for the four badges and the navbar button once the listing is live, your re-edit of zconnect.mp4 (just replace the file in resources/videos/ — nothing to rewire), the compatibility section image which is still the macbook-guy.jpg placeholder, the footer social icons which aren’t linked to anything yet, and the orphaned anchor component in your library that I can delete whenever.
Nice progress for one day — the page went from empty project to a complete, dark, working landing page with a video demo. Enjoy the break, and good luck with the ZConnect launch.
User
Site has been established on my server so that I can fully test. When I click on the video in the published site I get “No video with supported format and MIME type found.”
Claude
That error message is the browser saying it either couldn’t fetch the file or couldn’t decode it — and since the modal played fine in Elements preview, the page wiring itself is sound. Two suspects, and one quick test splits them:
Open the video’s URL directly in the browser on the published site — yourdomain/resources/videos/zconnect.mp4 (adjust if your export structure differs; you can grab the exact path from the page source’s <source src=...>).
If that 404s, the file didn’t make it to the server or the path shifted — check the upload included the resources/videos folder. If it loads as a download or plays weirdly, it’s a server MIME issue: the server needs to send .mp4 as video/mp4 (on Apache, AddType video/mp4 .mp4 in .htaccess fixes it).
If the direct URL plays in Safari but the error appears in Chrome or Firefox, it’s the codec — and this is my prime suspect. iPhone recordings and many Mac exports default to HEVC (H.265), which Safari and Elements’ WebKit-based preview play happily but Firefox doesn’t at all (that exact “No video with supported format and MIME type found” wording is Firefox’s), and Chrome only sometimes. You can confirm in two seconds: open zconnect.mp4 in QuickTime, press ⌘I, and look at the format line — “HEVC” means that’s it.
The fix is re-exporting as H.264, which every browser plays. Since you’re planning to re-edit the video anyway, just export the final cut as H.264/“Most Compatible.” If you want to fix the current file immediately via ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i zconnect.mp4 -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -movflags +faststart zconnect-h264.mp4
(+faststart also moves the metadata to the front of the file so playback starts before the whole file downloads — worth having regardless.)
Then replace the resource in Elements and republish. Tell me which branch it turned out to be — if it’s the server path rather than the codec, I’ll dig into how Elements structures resource paths on export to make sure the page and folder agree.
User
I’ve redone the video, now named /resources/videos/bythom-zconnect-intro.mp4. Can you swap that for the one that’s currently being used.
Claude
[Reconnects to the reopened project and swaps the modal’s video source to the new file.]
Swapped — the modal now plays videos/bythom-zconnect-intro.mp4. Everything else about the player (the 9:16 frame, poster image, vertical-video CSS fix, close button) carries over untouched, so it’s just the source that changed. Republish and the new file will go up with the page.
Two small notes: the old zconnect.mp4 is still sitting in your resources — now unused, so you can delete it in Elements to keep the published site lean (no rush; it just means uploading a video nobody plays). And when you test on the server, do check it in Firefox or Chrome specifically, not just Safari — if the original failure was the HEVC codec, those are the browsers that would have shown it, so they’re the proof the re-export solved it.
User
Still doesn’t work. Video is “MPEG-4 AAC, H.264” according to file data. In Firefox you get the message I noted earlier. In Safari you get just a black box for the movie, which also doesn’t play.
Claude
H.264/AAC failing in both browsers kills the codec theory — and importantly, it means both video files failed the same way, which points at something environmental: the path the page requests, the upload, or how your server serves .mp4. Let me actually look at the live site rather than theorize.
[Checks project settings for the site URL; can’t reach the unindexed test domain directly; verifies in the component source that the page emits a plain relative source path.]
The page-side code checks out — the component writes a plain relative <source src="resources/videos/…mp4">, identical in preview and publish. And here’s the telling pattern: it worked in Elements preview (served by the app itself) but fails on your server in both browsers, with both files, and both codecs. That combination almost certainly means the problem is between the browser and your server, not in the page or the video. Firefox’s exact message appears when the fetched “video” comes back as the wrong content type (like an HTML error page), and Safari’s silent black box matches the same failure.
Two minutes of testing on your machine will pinpoint it. First, view source on the published page and search for .mp4 to get the exact URL being requested (with cache-busting on it may carry a ? query — harmless, but confirm the path portion). Then check what the server actually returns for it:
curl -I https://bythompress.com/resources/videos/bythom-zconnect-intro.mp4
(adjusting to the exact path from the page source). The headers tell the whole story:
- 404 → the file isn’t where the page thinks. Check that the
resources/videos/folder made it up in the publish/upload. - 200 but
Content-Type: text/html→ the server is intercepting the request and serving a page instead. Prime suspect on your setup: hotlink/media protection in an .htaccess — if bythompress.com inherited rewrite rules from your other sites (which I’d expect protect media files), those rules may be blocking or redirecting .mp4 requests even from your own page. A referrer-check rule that doesn’t whitelist the new domain would do exactly this. - 200 with
Content-Type: application/octet-streamortext/plain→ MIME config; addAddType video/mp4 .mp4to .htaccess. - 200 with
video/mp4but noAccept-Ranges: bytes→ the server isn’t honoring byte-range requests, which Safari requires for video playback (Firefox is more forgiving, so this alone wouldn’t explain Firefox — but combined issues are possible).
My money is on one of the middle two given both browsers fail identically. Tell me what the headers say and I’ll give you the exact .htaccess fix — and if it turns out to be the hotlink-protection scenario, the fix is one added condition rather than removing your protection.
User
I published the page to bythompress.com if you can look at that better. I think this is the relevnt code:
(pasted the published modal/video HTML source)
So yesterday I paid $20 to a bot company to set MCP so all I asked was for it to connect to Elements and test to say it had done - simple request. I hour later all monthly credits used - please upgrade and no set up! So how many thousands of pounds did you pay for this? 