Favicon as a Face of Your Site

Favicon as a Face of Your Site

Favicon (the shortage of «Favorites Icon») is the small image you see at the beginnig of your browser bar when visiting any website. Favicons also make your bookmarks list look multicolored and nice. They appear there with the link name when you add one more link to your bookmarks. By default, when a site doesn't have any you just see a small sheet of paper (for FireFox) left to 'http:'.

Mostly web developers like to have a custom icon for their websites. It's something like a hat you wear to complete your style: actually you can do without it, but that's nice to have one. When people do not remember your name, they just say 'that guy with a nice hat'. Thus, a favicon adds something special to your site, makes it differ from the others in any Bookmark list.

Nowadays favicons work with almost all the popular browsers like IE, Opera, FireFox etc.

How to create a favicon

To make a favicon for your site you will need some special graphic editor, like Microsoft Photodraw or whatever having the function of pixels editing, that will let you enlarge your picture and not won't corrupt the pixels. So, you just create the image, adjust it to appropriate size and edit it with icon editor. Do not forget, that your favicon should be of 16x16 pixels and better have 8-bit color.

There are a lot of freeware programs for editing icons in Internet. So you just need to search for one, like Icon Collector Graphics Editor or  ForgeIcon, download it and install on your PC. Or there is another easier way — just  go to http://www.favicon.com. They have online software to create an icon. You will just use your creativity in creating some attractive icon. Then name it "favicon.ico". ICO — is an extension for all the icon images.

Launch your favicon

To make your icon visible to your visitors, upload it to your server. You will need some FTP client, like FileZilla (it's also a freeware), or just use your browser, but in this case you must know your appropriate FTP path. Place the favicon to some folder you want it to appear in. For example it's  http://www.yourdomain.com. Then, after you saved the favicon in the root directory, its whole path should be http://www.yourdomain.com/favicon.ico. If you have a plenty of different icons for each page of your site, you just place them in the needed directory. Like, http://www.yourdomain.com/subfolder/favicon.ico.
Having performed all these steps you will get your personal favicon appearing in any browser each time your site is accessed. It will be placed in all the Bookmark lists containing link to your site. And people who do not know your name will call you  'that guy with a nice favicon on his site'

Enjoy the result!