C O O L P A G E H E L P . C O M - The Official Help Website for Cool Page Users

Hello Cool Page users or those who just dropped by. This section of CoolPageHelp is where I give insider information on Cool Page. My name is Shelby Moore III and I am the main and founding programmer of Cool Page. Who I am? Why did we create Cool Page? What is our vision for Cool Page?

I am a 35 year old (editors note: this article was written in 2000) non-nerdy guy, with a penchant for programming commercial software especially in the area of graphics and graphical user interfaces. Directly out of college (where I studied Electrical Engineering with Math emphasis) in 1986, I bought my second computer, an Atari ST, and developed one of the world's first WYSIWYG word processors on consumer PC. WordUp (okay I was into rap/funk music in my early 20s) sold 8,000 units worldwide and predated Microsoft Word and Ami with a similar feature set. We had some other addon products such as a fast printer driver for LaserJets that I pioneered, and one the world's first graphical font editors on consumer PC. (TurboJet and FONTZ!)

Atari ST faded and I joined a small company as the 1st programmer along with 2 founders (Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges) and Painter was the world's first program on consumer PC to simulate real painting and art. It is now Corel Painter. I left to dabble in 3D software and Art-o-matic was released in 1997-- probably the world's first program on consumer PC that could draw cartoon line rendering of 3D model in real time. Shelby was simultaneously implementing the real-time, interactive 3D Viewer and some 3D file format import features for EOS Photomodeler.

While creating the web site for Art-o-matic, I became extremely frustrated with trying to layout the page in Adobe PageMill. Every time I moved one thing, the whole page would reformat and domino effect. I remembered a programmer friend of mine had shown me an early beta of NetObjects Fusion which he was working on. After failing to download the 40MB (megabytes!) trial of Fusion on my slow dialup connection, I realized that someone needed to create a really easy-to-use and easy-to-try WYSIWYG, pixel-exact placement, drag+drop web page editor. For 18 months I had the idea for Cool Page in my head but I continued to tell myself there were already too many editors on the market, that it would be an enormous project, and that Microsoft would crush us with FrontPage (we all know how what happened to Netscape when Microsoft gave Internet Explorer away for free with every copy of Windows).

For several reasons I finally decided to take the leap in September 1998 and began programming Cool Page. Partially because I was working from a gutted Art-o-matic source code base which had been refined over a 2 year period, I was able to release Cool Page 1.0 in November 1998, after a frantic 2 1/2 month development period that consisted of not seeing any daylight, having meals brought to my desk, and sleeping under the desk for a minimal 4 hours.

Looking back, Cool Page 1.0 was so horribly limited and I'm surprised I wasn't embarrassed to release it! I guess it will be the same feeling a year from now when we look back at the version 2.5 which is shipping today. Here we continually improve the product and our goal is nothing short of making the best possible product. However, we stick to certain principles which guided the early versions of Cool Page. Most importantly we realize that what has made Cool Page so popular is that it saves people a lot of time both in learning and in use. However, Cool Page inspires people to do more and we want to continue to add more really high-end features (such as the Events released in Webmaster 2.5) in our unique way of making them understandable to anyone, and with a modicum of learning curve. How do we do this? In short we think a lot. Before we add any feature we think a long time about the ramifications and keeping in mind that our users are not programmers or nerds and have no time to become so.

                                             Shelby Moore III
                                             CEO 3Dize, Inc.
                                             Lead programmer of Cool Page and Art-o-matic