One website, forty film ideas and a ready shot list

Every website you work on now has its own page in PageToVid, with its videos and the media captured for it, in one place. You never have to create it. The moment you make a video, on the site or through the API, or capture anything with the Chrome extension, the website is registered on your account. The extension even registers it as a screencast starts, so the site exists before the first upload arrives.

Pasting an address on the home page now follows the same idea. When you are signed in, it takes you straight to that website's page, with its analysis, its ideas and a button to make the film. First-time visitors keep the quick two-step flow, because a first impression is about speed.

The same release brought a light theme to both the website and the extension, with dark kept as the default and the right colours from the very first paint.

A website page with nothing on it asks an obvious question: what now? So the page answers it. As soon as you add a site, it reads the site and proposes films, each with a ready-made creative brief that opens straight into the creation form.

We shaped the ideas around how people really plan:

• Ten ideas in each of four formats: explainer, demo, ad and tutorial. The four are written at the same time, so you wait for the slowest one, not all four in a row.
• Each idea carries its own shots, two to four of them, with precise instructions: where to start recording, what to linger on, which page or element to show. You only capture what the video needs.
• It starts by itself. Adding a site begins the analysis; the button is still there to try again or regenerate later.

The effect is that a blank page becomes a menu. Pick the idea that fits your week, follow its shot list, and make the film.

Our Chrome extension could already capture a page's brand by hand. We moved the same method to our servers, so every website gets it automatically, with no extension needed. A real Chromium browser, the same engine our recorder uses, opens your page and measures it:

• colours weighted by how much of the page they cover, with fonts and corner radius, computed exactly as the extension does;
• social profiles, recognised across nine well-known platforms;
• button styles, shown on your site page with their real styling;
• the social image, logo, description and a fresh screenshot, saved as media for the site.

The scan runs alongside the idea planning and never holds it up. Because it already gathers your colours, logo and screenshots, we removed those from the shot lists, so the planner never asks you to capture something we have.

A website page is something you share, bookmark and come back to, so we made sure it opens from anywhere: a click, a refresh, a shared link or a bookmark, in English, French, Spanish and German.

Two details made that solid. Web addresses of sites always contain a dot, and the part of our server that recognises file names now looks for a dot only at the very end of a path, so a domain is never mistaken for a file. We checked the rule against fourteen real and unusual paths before shipping. And every redirect in the app now goes through our language-aware navigation, so a French, Spanish or German visitor always lands on the page in their own language.

The habit we keep from this is simple: test each route in every language, by typing the address as well as by clicking, because the default language is the one least likely to show a gap.

The website is now the unit the product is built on. You add it once, and PageToVid does the groundwork: it reads the site, learns its brand, proposes forty films across four formats and tells you exactly what to capture for each.

For anyone with one site and many stories to tell, that means less staring at an empty form and more films that fit together, in the same colours, from the same source. Paste your address on /new to see your own website's page, or read what the Chrome extension can capture for it.