Mark your website URL with a Favicon

Have you ever noticed that when you look at your browser’s bookmarks menu or address bar, some entries have their own little icon next to their URL?

It is called a “Favicon” (a graphic file with an .ico extension) and is placed in the root directory of the website. Every time you bookmark a site that has its own favicon.ico file, it is added to your browser and will be visible from then on in the favorites menu and address bar.

At first, only large websites had a favicon, but now you too can create one and use it to brand your website. The first thing you have to do is create your favicon. To be viewed by browsers, it must be 16×16 pixels in size. To create one, you can use a graphics program called Icon Forge (you can download a free trial from CNET):

http://download.com.com/3000-2195-10128559.html

You can create an icon from scratch or import a 16×16 ‘.gif’ or ‘.jpg’ file and save it as an ‘.ico’ file.

You will then need to save your icon with the default name of ‘favicon.ico’ and upload it to the root directory of your website (where your index page is located). Finally, after that, you have to associate your icon to your web page. To do this, include the following HTML immediately after the HEAD tag of your page:

link REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico”

Once you’ve done that, that’s it. To try it out, go to their website and bookmark your page. You should be able to see the bookmarks icon next to the title of the bookmarked page. Also, the next time you type your URL into the address bar, you’ll see your favicon to the left of the URL.

(Favicons work with Internet Explorer 5 or later, and with recent versions of Netscape.)

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