Here is an article I've written, and seems as this is my 100th post, instead of submitting it elsewhere I thought DP would appreciate it more! In the modern web world many designers love to use icons as part of their work because of the benefits they can have. Used properly they can make actions easy for visitors, help promote your RSS feed and social media accounts and also improve the overall look and feel of your website. However it can go wrong, so here is a list of 5 things to think about before integration: Don't over use them, sometimes a good old fashioned text link is perfectly adequate. If it is confusing don't use it. The last thing you want to do is send your visitors into a twist, they will soon leave for a rivals website. Make sure they are in-keeping. If you have a rugged looking website (EG about gardening), then go with hand-drawn style icons, these should fit in well. But if yours is of a professional business nature then slick smooth icons will do the job. Don't have too many. Sometimes you see designers of blog templates who put about 50 social media icons below the comments section, it looks awful and very unnecessary when an addthis.com button can do the same job. Locate them in appropriate places in your design. Hiding them out the way where they won't be seen is pointless, and would be better left out of the design completely. But equally don't put them in the way of your most important content. A few other things to consider are size, colours compared to your design, and how long they will be relevant for, if you have to keep changing your icons once every few months it could get tedious. If you don't have any icons to use in your web designs here is a list of icon sites where you can download the sets for free. A lot of the points here may seem obvious but just make sure you are following them!