Making Footer editable in WP-Admin

I see many themes providing the feature to make your own footer from wp-admin (appearance section/footer)
For the time being I inserted a sidebar into the footer and used the Text-Widget to add contents but I am not satisfied with this.

WHAT I REALLY WANT TO DO;
I want to add an option appearance section of wp-admin where the contents of the footer can be added. Further i want to add a Checkbox group with icons of Facebook, twitter etc. along with textbox to add the custom link for each of them.

Please visit my site to see the my footer (copyright and icons), that might explain better then words. http://www.mentorarts.com/wordpress/advpress/