In any list of documents in a system it is a good idea to add some thumbnails of the document so that your users can get a quick overview of what a document looks like before downloading it. This is a good alternative to just displaying an icon of the document type.

Creating Word document icons is very simple thanks to a service called LiveDocx. LiveDocx was created as a web service to allow the easy creation of most document formats from a simple template. However, it is possible to send a normal Word document as the template file and get an image of the file in return.

One thing that comes in useful when linking to other websites is to use a little thumbnail of the site as part of the link. Although it is possible to do this it usually involves having command line access to the server so that you can install various different programs and extensions.

The simplest mechanism accomplish this is to use third party sites to create the thumbnail for you. Here are a few examples of free thumbnail services.