The Online NetScape Handbook--Using background colors, colored text, graphics. There are some backgrounds you can use from here, download the little tiles. NOTE: Many design-oriented WebPeople refer to these (some of which are remarkably ugly and unsuitable for page backgrounds) as "the Netscape Hall of Shame". Try to do your own backgrounds!

• The Background Sampler -- This is it, the Hall of Shame. Dozens of images -- many quite hideous -- for those fancy backgrounds you see all over. No, I didn't use any of 'em, but I got some ideas from browsing this sampler. Download and save them, then reduce them in size and reduce colors to no more than 16 (adaptive dither usually). You want the smallest possible graphics files, especially backgrounds, for quickest transfer.

• Netscape Handbook: Answers to Tough Questions--Tables, problems, the source info is here. Netscape tables are the key to good page layouts, snappy menus without huge, slow imagemaps, and more.

Colors & Hex Numbers--You change the color of the main page text (white here) and the click-text for links and button frames by 6-digit combos of hexadecimal numbers. Background page colors -- like the dusty blue here -- are set that way too. That's explained here with some sample colors obtained by experiment. Color names are not very indicative you have to look at the samples. IMPORTANT TIP: if you use BGCOLOR (as I did on this page) and get a sort of plaid or dotty color, be sure to use <H4> and </H4> to embolden all basic page text, otherwise it fuzzes out and becomes illegible. Type colors set in your header are also explained; there is much less possible variation here.

Background Explorer -- neat on-line utility. You can design your own background tiles, with some control of color and pattern seeds. A randomizer means they'll all be different. If you generate one you like, save it to your own system and use it on your page. These may come out kind of ugly too, but at least no human being is responsible for that.

Realm Graphics Library--This guy has some of everything you need to start getting fancy with your pages: little icons, those round buttons, many arrows, lines, those Under Construction signs, lines....well arranged, easy to browse and use.

• Realm Graphics: Backgrounds--A vast library of JPEG tiles, most about 3K (usually can be compressed more) well-categorized and in reasonably small table-page display, so you don't have to wait an eternity for all the tiles to load. He has a test program so you can click a tile and see it fill a typical background, with sample test in white, black, gray, and small images in other primary colors. That'll give you an idea of how each background will work for your planned page. With paint programs or even a simple freebie like LVIEW (that you an download from one of the links below) you can change the colors of these background tiles -- bleach them out, go from grey to brown, etc.

Adobe's page -- Info about PhotoShop the best professional paint-graphics program, Illustrator (some think it the bst vector draw program) and Pagemaker including the new web page designer based on Pagemaker and Netscape. Download Adobe Arcobat reader, filters, read design tips (Acrobat pages made for web display and requiring the 1.5 meg Reader).

• Image Club's Graphics page -- has some freebis for downloads of their vast collections of image photo stock, backgrounds, fancy fonts, maps, CDROM's of world famous art, and plenty more. Sign up for their monthly catalog; and read about their layout tips and tricks (for print pages). To get their freebie graphics and font samplers, you'll need to configure the Adobe PDF Acrobat reader for Netscape.

Web Developer's Virtual Library -- classy stuff for advanced page developers. Lots of programs (PERL and C) and links-to, if you can use them. Very pretty site; most stuff there is not for beginners, though.

• Basics: 3d graphics for the world wide web

• File conversion utilities for 3d graphics for the web

Tutorial on images for Web pages -- by Karen Strom. This lady does scientific image-processing and runs the awesome Hanksville server which contains zillions of Native American web resource pointers. She points you to European EXPO guy who has software (for UNIX) which servers must run.

Tutorial, making fancy Web GIF graphics -- Windows screen-shots, walk you through it with LVIEW Pro (PC's) shareware. From Australia, Webmaster runs a graphics and InterNet consulting company

GIF graphics--main focus is Mac users -- helpful software to download, pointers to other Mac Web resources. DOS, Windows and UNIX software pointers also.

Internet resources for Macintosh support -- Includes downloadable software.

Page design emphasizing graphics by a Japanese design firm--the author makes a few mistakes in his English, but this is a clear demo of some graphics layout tricks, especially "align" for graphics and wraparound or caption text, and the creation of fancy-looking tables. He shows use of the NetScape graphics extensions, pretty much standard on all web pages; use them to control layouts in a simple way, left right and center placements of graphics. Fancier stuff requires using tables to format.