Linkware Websets

One of the things 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 matching elements. 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, BladePro 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've used these classic websets on several of the pages on my site and even my main "look" is an old webset.

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).

Many of these links are Wayback Machine links and, as the years go by, I'm having to replace links more often with the Wayback ones. Just a note, if the Internet Archive or Wayback Machine is down, these links will not work. Also, the Anglefire/Lycos/Tripod links used to be pretty stable and I thought they might be there til the end of time. But lately I've noticed they are up and down more often than in the past. If one of those links doesn't work, give it some time and it may come back up. So far they always have! Eventually.

Old School Linkware/Freeware Websets and Graphics



Newer Linkware/Freeware Websets and Graphics