Favicon is the acronym for- “Favorites Icon”. It is a tiny graphic that replaces the standard web page icon in your browser’s Address bar for better website’s visibility. It is a small image placed in the web site root directory and is a resource file used by web sites to customize a visitor’s experience of the site in their browser. It is the very small image that is displayed to the left of the URL in your browser address bar. The image is only one or two pixel wide ( 16 x 16 pixels or 32 x 32) and it can also be animated. Creating your own Favicon is a pretty easy process and can be done using various software.
A favicon is NOT a simple bitmap image, as some may believe neither is it a gif nor a jpg but carries it own file extension (ICO) so it is referred to as a .ico file, e.g, example.ico. People use this file to easily recognize a website for better website’s visibility. Look at your address bar when you go to websites like Yahoo, Google or MSN, do you see the Y, G or Butterfly, those are favicons and wherever you see them, even without the names associated with them, you would recognize these as the various websites.
Therefore, creating an outstanding one is particularly important for website branding and personalize branding, thus having one is yet another way to establish your brand. In the modern versions of many browsers such as Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Mozilla etc.., it is always automatically displayed. However in Internet Explorer it is displayed on the Favorites menu and on the address bar. IE associates them with bookmarks (favorites), so you must first add the page to Favorites. It will appear on the browser address bar and on the Favorites menu, the second time you visit the page added to Favorites. If it doesn’t appear even after bookmarking and revisiting the web page, restarting the browser should address the issue. The only way to restore a favicon is to delete the link from the Favorites folder and recreate it.
A good favicon should be original, simple and fits the logo and color schemes used in the web site for which it is intended. It also offer an easy way for a visitor to recognize your site in their bookmarks, as it is saved along with the bookmark and is an important part of a corporation identity and website’s visibility. After creating your favicon, you simply copy in a line of code to your web page and then upload the image and web page to your server.
If you want the icon to appear you must upload a file named favicon.ico. When someone bookmarks your page, the browser will look for the ico file and display it, so ensure you upload the file to the root folder of your web site. If you thought it takes a whole lot of work and gurus in web design to create one, think again. There are some sites that will help you create your icon from your logo without using a graphics program or you can use free programs to do so for greater website’s visibility.
My reservation about creating them with these website are that the have a record of them and if I have decided not to use a particular one at that point in time, what is to stop them from selling or giving it away. In the process I would lose my favicon identity and thus my branding ability. Most site don’t guarantee against this. However, there are many free software out there to create them.
Simple Steps To Create Favicon Ico File
1. Download Report -shows step by step process including creating graphic
2. Download and install Irfanview
3. Create favicon from graphic file on your computer
4. Upload it to root folder on your website (not images folder)
Carlston Hamblin is an Information Technology Tutor who show ways to use different tools to build and optimize your website for successful businesses online. Get more information and resources by visiting his blog on Favicons with more articles, tips and free software.
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