There are numerous sites online that have free graphics and other resources for you to use on your website, these often require a link back (or maybe a button) but if you dig around you will probably find high quality graphics, animations and even templates that match your mood.

Here you have some resources I've found to be useful:

Webweaver, graphics and clipart	Graphics, clipart and animations... and when you are done with those visit their homepage for additional resources.
Animation Library	It's alive! Thousands on animated gifs at your fingertips.
Angel's Web Graphics	Themed sets, just add content and serve.
Free Center-Graphics	If you still haven't found what you are looking for you can try this list of links.

Please respect their terms if you use their graphics.

Creating banners is easy: you define the size of the banner, apply a background and type your text on top of it using a nice fancy font, that's it. You may also want to add a small graphic.

Buttons are not much more complicated than banners because you can automate their creation. There are numerous freeware and shareware applications out there that enable you to design a basic button in a matter of seconds, where you can customize the size, font, appearance and even add a small graphic on top of it. Then you save that as a .jpg or .gif and that's it, you have a professional looking button that has been custom made for your website. By the way, you and also use these applications to design your banners, if you want to go for a fancier look.

You can use your word processor to do your drawing for you. Dingbats are a great source of graphics as well. You can use an individual character to create a sort of accent or you can take it one step further and use these characters as seals to create more complex scenes (just remember to save them as graphics and use them as such on your website).

If you use a public domain dingbat, you can also use a character as an outline, and then add color to generate a more complex graphic.

These are a few dingbat archives you can turn to:

House of Lime	A great collection of fonts on many subjects.
Lord Kyl's Medieval & Fantasy Fonts	Not just dingbats (though there is a good collection of those as well), but also fonts text fonts that will make your pages stand out.
The Dingbat Pages	A large, well organized collection of dingbat fonts to meet your needs.
Dingbat archives	Not really an archive, but rather a list of links to numerous resources

Please respect the author's terms if you are using his/her fonts

You have your banners, you have your buttons, and you have your dingbats, now put them all together and you can get something that is more than the sum of the parts. Who said the text in your button (if you are using an application to design them) meant characters?

Use your imagination, now that your drawing skills are no longer critical to your design there are no limits to what you can do.

The other thing you can do is feature sounds on your website... the question is: should you? That depends on what kind of site you maintain, and you also have to keep in mind that using sound can easily backfire. There are a few examples of soundbits that add something to a site, and lots of them that detract from it.

A soundbit that sets the mood in a splash screen that is visible for a few seconds may be attractive, but it adds to the loading time of that page, and it can cause a problem in some environments (like a library or a dorm. Seriously, getting your visitors killed by their angry roommate who is desperately trying to study for that final is not a good idea ).

A pretty melody in a constant loop on a page where you are reading something can be a real pain, because it tends to get annoying after a couple of minutes, and once again, it adds to the loading time... people are just as likely to look for the exit as they are to click on the "mute" button.

A surprising soundbit when the page loads can be a nice touch, and it can load in a couple of seconds... but then again, it may scar someone for life (and I do mean scar, not scare. I still have the marks from an incident in which I was greeted by a howling wolf when I entered a site, while I had a cat sitting on my lap. I could laugh about it because it wasn't an everyday occurrence).

This does not mean that there is something wrong with having a few sound files for visitors to download, if they choose to do so, nor does it mean that sound is a bad idea in a site in which it is relevant to the content, but I do advise caution when you add sound to your website. The fact that you can do something doesn't mean you should.

Then there are plenty of other gadgets out there, they are everywhere: chat rooms, message boards, classified adds, counters, webrings, link exchanges, and many more. Should you get them all.

Depends on your website, but probably the answer here is no. A couple of them may be a good idea, of course, like a chat room or a message board, or a classified section (especially if they are confined), but just make sure those extra gadgets really add to your site. And keep in mind that you pay for most of these free services in the form of advertisement you don't control. This advertisement is usually rather annoying and in some instances it can even get you in trouble.

One example: a number of free hosts have a popup from a casino on a lot of their sites, the problem is that those sites are often visited by children, since the hosts are not content-selective when it comes to placing those adds. In other instances (though these are far less common) you may even get an unwanted banner or popup from an adult site. The magnitude of this problem depends a lot on your target audience, but it is something you should consider

Anyway, if you are using any free services at all, monitor the advertisement that is being displayed on your website carefully.