FABLED.DAY - resources for the new web

Resources

Realize that there is nothing wrong with using premade resources given proper credit and permission. The goal of almost any good website is to convey your message. Your methods will depend on what you’re trying to express. If you’re looking to create a large (organized, navigable) site on neocities or a similar platform, resources and tutorials provided by kindred spirits can be a godsend. The following resources have been helpful or inspirational for me, either in orienting myself, or in building my site.

Discord Servers

Penny's Club - this is a smaller server focused on neocities primarily, but welcoming to those who make their home on other parts of the small web. It's a good place for seeking advice, help with coding, and general community. Just disregard Farm if necessary...
r/neocities Discord - a large server about neocities mostly, with channels for coding help, general chatter, and unrelated fun stuff. I am less active here than in smaller servers, but this is a great place if you'd like to make friends, too.
Neozones.club Discord - this is an extremely large server with a simple focus on chilling. There is a channel about neocities (not very active), and quite a few about related tech topics. It is very much aligned with the values of the small web, regardless.

Concerning the "Small Web"

Penny’s Pages Wiki - a rather out-of-date, but still fascinating, wiki focused on neocities and related sites, culture, and events.
Rediscovering the Small Web - the absolute best and shiniest guide to the “small web” that I’ve found thus far, and guaranteed to spark shivers of nostalgia in even the most jaded of us.
The Small Web is Beautiful - Ben Hoyt explains different approaches to the concept and, IMHO, takes things to some pretty hardcore extremes.
Smallweb.page - a small guide to the “small web” which, rather poetically, describes websites as “multiple shrines dedicated to different gods, not competing or crowding each other out.”
You Must Make a Website - a post by Tumblr user @Spiders-Around providing a brief guide with links to making your own, as described by the post “webbed site.”
Browsing the World Wide Web - a Tumblr user explains both how sites on services like neocities work, tips for creating them, and advice for browsing and getting the most out of your “small web” experience.”
Neocities: an Underrated Online Gem - Study Break magazine provides a very brief introduction to neocities specifically, the site’s history and purpose, and offers encouragement.

Layouts and Themes

My Pillow Fort provides whimsical resources, including fonts, templates, and emojis, with a cheery ethereal vibe. The introduction and the way one journeys through the site is very clever, and also reminiscent of the metaphor-heavy web design of the early-2000s, while employing modern techniques.
Foollovers provides a large array of premade layouts. If your site is primarily about showcasing your writing, fanfic, a comic, or something similar, a premade layout is an ideal timesaver. The entire site is in Japanese, but Google translate works. Editing the layout is a bit tricky because all notation in the code is in Japanese, too. Nevertheless, it’s well worth it, and will save an immense amount of time for someone looking to create a content-rich site on the small web.
Wishglows has some really cool, readily responsive (mostly) layouts. Almost all of them feature large, gorgeous images of anime scenes and characters (up to and including eevolutions!) which is wonderful, don’t you think? It really aligns more with what I remember of the aesthetics from 2002-2004 than earlier, and brings back many memories of poking at Photoshop myself (no longer a hobby, but Wishglows is good at it).
Flower&Clover gives us a nice array of vintage-inspired layouts and graphics, some of which were apparently taken from actual antique magazines and other similar resources. This is an unusual treasure on the small web, and ought to be kept in anyone’s file - you never know when a little vintage frill might be needed.
Repth features premade layouts, both optimized for responsiveness and more static. They run the gamut of aesthetics from the first decade of the 21st century. Not a ton of them, but very diverse choices, some anime, some cute, some of the flat corporate style, etc. The site itself hasn’t been updated in a while that I saw, but seems to be tenacious and will likely stay online.
Many resources from Sadgrl are useful for beginners, or so I’ve been told. I haven’t used much of those yet, myself. I include them here nonetheless because their popularity and tenacity speaks to their appeal and quality, I think.

Graphics and Other Assets

Whimsical primarily deals in animated gifs, but not the irritating kind. These are subtle and beautiful, vibrantly-colored, yet with a certain gentleness. Perfect for sites that want to collect such things on one page, or website creators who just love animation in general and love to incorporate it in their designs.
This Honeycomb Badge Grid by Mooeena is a cute and creative way of displaying hexagon-shaped pixel stamps on your site. You can collect hexagons that relate to the topic of your site, or to the message you wish to convey to your readership. I’ve used it to create a talisman (of sorts) on one of my sites - perhaps you’ll run across it there.
Foollovers again provides a (quite vast) collection of material (images, animated gifs, etc, often paired with codes to copy for frames and such). Again, this site is in Japanese, but not difficult to auto-translate passably - us English-speakers often act like we rule the web, but we really ought to get over it and make some room.
Native neocities visitor counter and update tracker by Dannarchy While it extends beyond, neocities itself has become quite central to the small web. If you use neocities, this will show you how to display (on your site) how many visitors your site has received alongside the date it was last updated, automatically. This doesn’t track hits (times an item from your site was loaded), but rather, represents neocities’s best attempt to track how many times people have visited the site, based on IP address.
Fine is a Japanese sozai site featuring sketchy (in the good way) artwork that you can easily include in your own pages, a little different from the usual pixel art. It’s sweet, soft, and above all, unique and creative. You’ll find the site hard to navigate if you don’t speak Japanese (I don’t), but clicking random links works, too. Google Translate was no help?
Mazewan features a variety of sozai artwork, but really shines when it comes to cute animal images. A lot of them would make great site mascots, but you might also collect them or use them in other ways. The images are rather minimalist, and that’s unusual in sozai, but useful if it fits your aesthetic
Asterism is a site offering fonts and image resources. It leans heavily on the cute and pink side of things, with lots of lace. I haven’t used the fonts, but the images look amazing, small, and easily adaptable. The site, like Foollovers, is entirely in Japanese, and slightly harder to navigate if you can’t read that, but still doable. Definitely worth a look if you want a “cute” site.
Blinkies.cafe features a generator for the old school “blinkie” animated gifs we used to splash all over our Geocities websites back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, promoting causes we cared about, and linking to each other’s sites. You can also download blinkies generated by other people, but either way, there’s a lot of, ahem, blinking going on.
Pixel Garo is exactly what you’d expect - a collection of pixel icons. A very large collection in fact. Really, a pixel icon depicting or representing almost anything can be found on this site. You can really use this resource for many things, and it is up to you whether it will be used for good, or for awesome.
Patorjk’s ASCII Text Generator will produce stunning, complex graphical text just from ASCII. I include this here because it can be fun to generate a message (your name, perhaps, or the date of creation, who knows) in a fancy font, then paste it as a comment into your HTML code. It won’t be visible to the usual site visitors, but anyone who views the source code of your page will see it, and to me, that’s amusing and charming. This was something we did back in the early 2000s occasionally, and also used in emails.

Useful Larger Sites

Goatcounter seems to be the default free hit counter, allowing you to track the traffic coming to your site, where it is originating, and matters of your users’ locations, etc. Be mindful: many adblockers (used primarily on desktop devices, as far as I can tell) tend to block this script, and thus won’t give you information about those visits. It can still be somewhat helpful, and I incorporate it into some places.
Status.cafe provides a small, lightweight widget of sorts that you can embed in your website to display a short message from you that, ideally, you'll update frequently to let people know what you're doing, or any other short quip that you'd like to share. Sign up quickly, because accounts must be verified manually, and it takes a few days!
Cbox.ws allows you to put a small, free chatroom on your site. It has (limited but colorful) customization of the little room’s boxy appearance (almost anywhere) on your page. I don’t recommend using it for major gatherings or serious discussion, but rather for small chitchat and snippets of messages between guests on your page. Be sure to register your own name as an administrator account and follow the site’s (rather byzantine) instructions.
ImageColorPicker is old and plastered in advertisements nowadays, but it still works, allowing you to load an image, any image, into the site, generate a color palette from it, and pick colors directly from the image. Useful for choosing complimentary hexadecimal color codes to match images with text and other features of your site, and for building color palettes directly.
Color Hex allows you to build and save small hexadecimal-coded color palettes under various names and tags. Useful for keeping track of your own aesthetics for various sites/layouts, as well as picking up new inspiration from other people. The site itself is a little messy and features many spelling errors, timeouts, etc, but it’s survivable and well worth it so far.
EzGif sucks. It really is quite awful, but it is the most useful and ad-free of those available for editing gifs on mobile (or desktop, if one hasn’t got a designated utility or is in a pinch). Can also help to achieve a retro look and feel, and does make the process much easier than constantly being stabbed in the back by Canva.
Code Pen isn’t much in use on neocities, but I find it very useful for demonstrative purposes and previewing small snippets of code. It is also good to browse what other people have made in order to learn more about the languages.
Goofonts organizes existing Google fonts into useful categories and allows users to add tags to them. This is way more helpful than Google's own system for sorting them. If you don't hate Google enough to stop using Google fonts, try this to find some new, beautiful ones.
Zoho has one of the worst user interfaces I’ve ever seen on a web-based service. Still, it also offers budget email that can be connected to a domain name quite easily with no hassle. Useful and affordable if you’ve got a domain name hooked up with neocities or another service, and want a matching email.
Atabook seeks to fill the void left by the closing of 123guestbook as simply as possible. It does not have as many features or customizable aspects as 123 did, but is otherwise a worthy successor. I look forward to future options it might provide?