Different approaches can be used to integrate FontAwesome into a website:

For plain HTML/CSS:

• Download the zip available here, unzip, and copy the contents to your website. Then reference the /css/font-awesome.css in the webpage head like so:
  
  <link rel="stylesheet" src="/assets/font-awesome/css/font-awesome.css">
• Reference it in the webpage head using a CDN address. One such address would be https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.6.3/css/font-awesome.min.css. To reference this, just use a link tag but set the source to the CDN address instead

For Package managers:

Most package managers support Font Awesome as a package, and there are some examples below:

• NuGet: Just search for and install Font-Awesome, or run the below command in the package console: Install-Package FontAwesome
• Ruby: Just run this command: gem install font-awesome-rails
• npm: just run this command: npm install font-awesome

The simple use-case is to refer to a single icon in its normal size: <i class="fa fa-camera-retro"></i> (View result in this fiddle.)

Create an empty tag (it is recommended to use <i> used for that) and assign class "fa" and the class corresponding to the desired icon (see list of icons here).

Font Awesome is an extremely simple yet powerful library to use, with 634 icons available in just a few words.

How does it work? Font Awesome uses Unicode characters stored in a ../fonts directory to change any i.fa elements to the respective unicode character, as such displaying the icon as text.

How do I create an icon? All icon classes have to be an i element, or an italic element, mainly for best practice, but also improves performance with Font Awesome. All icons also have the class fa on them. This denotes an icon and will not work without it. After that, just add the icon you want, prefixed with another fa-. A finished example is below:

<i class="fa fa-pencil"></i> becomes

Because font awesome works off unicode characters, it also allows any text manipulation to apply to it as well, such as font-size, color, and more.