A visual authoring system for animated multimedia homepage

The WWW has become a powerful media for knowledge displacement and acquisitions for Internet users. For Internet content providers, the homepage is the common way to let users know where the contents are placed. Currently, there are many homepage design tools available for content providers to make their Web pages, FrontPage Express, Flash, HotDog, to name a few. While making an animated multimedia homepage, most of these design tools have to use their extended programming features such as combing part of the code of JavaScript, or Java program to achieve this goal. For general users, especially for the non-computer professional users, to write Java programs to make an animated multimedia homepage is not an easy job. In this paper, a visual authoring system for general users to make an animated multimedia homepage is proposed. Based on this tool, users can create an animated multimedia homepage at their fingertips without writing any program or code. The proposed authoring tool has been technology transferred to the Best Wise International Computing Cooperation for product development. Examples shown in this paper are created based on the WebFace Maker (a product of the Best Wise International Computing Co.) which is a product developed using the proposed technology