I'm far from a theme ninja when it comes to Drupal. But I do my best to do what I can to give my sites a distinct look and feel. One way to offer up that distinct look and feel is to sprinkle links on your sites with custom icons.

On this site I've got two areas where I'm serving up icons that are not part of the original theme. My subscribe block (pictured at left) contains images that highlight the links for RSS, site bookmarking and email subscription.

I also use these images in other blocks when I'm linking to pages. You can see this in action in the watch and listen blocks on the front page. This technique is a departure from the normal look and feel of the theme. It also helps certain links to catch the eye of the user a bit more easily.

Drupal has an awesome customization feature that not too many new people seem to know about. You can customize just about any view by creating a special template file for that view.

For Example:

Let's say that you want to update the front page layout. What you need to do is create a custom template file for the front page. Drupal themes have template files for each node type. If you look in your theme directory you should see files like node.tpl.php and page.tpl.php. These files describe the layout for nodes (like blog posts) and pages respectively.

Open the page.tpl.php file. Then save the file as page-front.tpl.php. Congratulations, you have just created a custom theme file for the front page of your site. When you edit the contents of that file and upload it to your theme directory the layout in that file will apply only to the front page of your site.