The Stage, the main working interface in MicroSites.

I choose a typewriter effect for my text. It animates the text on the banner so it looks like it is being typed. What will they think of next? As the statement wrote itself from right to left, the animation of the man reading the newspaper slid across the screen just a step ahead of the letters. Adding motion was fairly easy as well. Just a click and drag process. From there you can adjust the speed at which the object moves, and the rate of the animation itself. (I could make our newspaper reader look like he had 32 cups of coffee!) Speaking of animations, MicroSites also allows you to import a series of frames to build your own animations, much like you would when building a Gif89a Animation. You can then include them on your banner.

I am off to a good start and everything has flowed pretty seamlessly. The program has responded to my every need without a problem. Now that my banner has posed its question ("What do you read to keep up on the animation industry?"), it needs to answer. So after the copy stays on screen long enough to read, it needs to disappear. No problem, just make a timed event for it to hide the item. Timed events are added through a second menu brought up by clicking on one of the three convenient editing buttons attached to each item. Voila! It's gone. At this point, I add the text that says, "Animation World Magazine," and command it to appear when the first line disappears. Easy enough, just add a timed event called, `replace text,' and my banner is complete. With little time and trouble, I have given life to an artistic vision.

The Evaluation
The program delivered on its claim of ease of use, the only major drawback I found was that you could not position an item outside of the defined stage area. This means that if you wanted to fly an item in and out of the banner, or just have it start from the outside and slide into visibility, you would have no control once it left the banner area. This is an inconvenience, making certain projects difficult.

I also decided to check out Zapa's web site to see a few examples of what they had come up with for banners. Clearly if someone was going to build cool banners with this program, it was going to be them. Unfortunately, the banners on their pages took awhile to download, and when they did, they played awfully slow. Eventually, my browser crashed.

I found MicroSites an easy to use program, and I think someone with minimal graphics or animation experience could pick it up without too much trouble. The creative possibilities are wide open, with lots of options from which to choose. The included clip art and animations are useful, and the promise of free updates makes the program worthwhile. The sales and marketing support shows Zapa's intention to cater to the small business, which is smart thinking in the age of on-line commerce. Small businesses have flourished on the `Net, because one doesn't need large amounts of start-up capital in order to distribute goods and services.

On the technical side, I am hesitant. The final output of the program is good but shaky. These Java applet banners do not quite seamlessly blend in on a page. It's rare that you would spend more than 30 seconds looking at a web page unless you were reading some text, and that is what it takes for a MicroSites' banner to load. A standard GIF89a Animation can be optimized to load in less than half that time. You may not get all the options, but you get your message across before the user decides to move on. Java is integrated into current browsers, but what about the people who surf with older browsers? Java has also been known to cause freezes and crashes on computers. My recommendation is to view the banners on-line at Zapa's site, and decide for yourself how well they get a message across.

MicroSites is published by Zapa Digital Arts and is a PC CD-ROM for Windows 95 or NT. Retail: $99.95. http://www.zapadigital.com

Ged Bauer is webmaster and graphic designer of Animation World Network. He also has worked for Star Media Systems on Power Surge, a series of packaged video transitions for non-linear editing software.