Making fonts awesome work ?

It is also better to download the font awesome assets directly and link to them locally. Loading assets from a server you don't control is never a good idea.

While generally this is true, it's not always a bad idea to use assets from cdn's like google. Not only are google cdns just as likely to not go down as your site, millions of people have already cached the library from there, making it one less thing to pull from your server and make your page load quicker.

Codeigniter is simply one of the tools you need to learn to be a successful developer. Always add more tools to your coding arsenal!