Linkware Websets

One of the things that I miss about the old web is all the wonderful graphics that were used in personal webpages. I think they all had an awesome look, from the pages that looked like a graphics directory threw up on them to the ones that had a very tied together look because they were created using a coordinating webset. This also makes me nostalgic because my mother was an artist at heart. One of the things she got really into was creating graphics using Paint Shop Pro and other programs.

I've found a bunch of sites that have "linkware" graphics. This is what I remember from my first foray onto the web. People would create coordinated sets and sometimes they sold them but sometimes you could get them for free. Here's a really neat blog posting from One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age that goes a little bit into the history of web graphics for personal sites evolving from a hot mess to coordinated sets.

Most of these sites have not been updated for a decade or more but there are still active ones out there. I'm not entirely sure if all of these websets will be functional. Many of them were made for a different resolution, use deprecated HTML and might have other issues. If you're good at HTML/CSS and really like the look of something, I'm sure there's a way to rework it into a modern framework.

I have recently cleaned up the listings. They are alphabetized now, the descriptions have been reworked so they aren't so wordy, spellings have been standardized (I had both "websets" and "web sets" - now it's just "websets") and I've listed more thoroughly categories and themes. Hopefully this will make it easier for you to search for something - sorry, no fancy tags or anything like that. You'll have to go old school and CTRL+F (Windows) or Command+F (Mac).


Old School Linkware/Freeware Websets and Graphics



Newer Linkware/Freeware Websets and Graphics