Miscellanea

A few items that don't fit anywhere else, or I don't know enough about (or perhaps care enough about) to be able to say much... but that shouldn't be overlooked.

Web Templates

FreeWebTemplates.com Free Web Templates, Just add Text! We also offer Free ifaces, free buttons, free backgrounds, free wallpaper and more.."

The Elated Web Toolbox is an all-in-one web design resource. Free buttons, bars, animated GIF's, bullets, backgrounds and clipart. Free web design tips and Photoshop tips and actions. As mentioned above, they also have free web page templates - you can build an entire site with one of these!

Fonts

MediaBuilder's Font Library has hundreds of graphical fonts divided into over two dozen categories.

Dynamic Graphics

Sometimes you might want to generate graphics on-the-fly, or automatically; e.g. to show a graph of server traffic. There's several free packages for doing so, but you'll usually need some programming expertise, ideally in C or Perl.

Thomas Boutell's GD package has become a de facto standard for dynamic graphics. It used to produce GIF output, but since that format turned out to be proprietary, it now produces PNG. Unisys holds a patent on the LZW compression algorithm, which is used in fully compressed GIF images. "gd is a graphics library. It allows your code to quickly draw images complete with lines, arcs, text, multiple colors, cut and paste from other images, and flood fills, and write out the result as a .PNG file. This is particularly useful in World-Wide Web applications, where .PNG is a format used for inline images."

GD.pm is a port of Thomas Boutell's gd graphics library. GD allows you to create color drawings using a large number of graphics primitives, and emit the drawings as PNG files.

I've had good results using GIFgraph to generate plots of server traffic. If you have Perl 5 then it's probably already there.

Image Mapping

If you want to produce an image that has various areas that when clicked, send the user to different pages depending on where the image was clicked, then you need to create an image map. There are two kinds: client or server side. Image maps originally were processed on the server, but a later development was browser handling, which is faster as it avoids sending the coordinates to the server, and waiting for the reply. Some older browsers may not be able to process client-side image maps, but you may provide both.

Thomas Boutell's Mapedit is a commercial product ($25) with a 30-day evaluation period. "Our user-friendly, graphical editor for World Wide Web imagemaps. Mapedit can add clickable "hotspots" to your images without the need to type coordinates. Just open your HTML page with Mapedit! Available for Windows 95/98/NT, Macintosh OS, and many Unix operating systems."

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How To Build a Web Site with Free Stuff Table of Contents
Conclusion and Acknowledgments