Creating a FAVICON

Have you ever browsed to a website and saw a neat little icon next to the URL in the address bar? What about the little picture that you see beside some of the links in your favorites? Well, that is called a FAVICON and you can easily create one of your own for your websites.

The file that you need to create to accomplish this is a Microsoft Windows Icon file. When creating files in this format, you can select the number of pixels to use. Be careful though as 16 x 16 is the number of pixels that are needed to create the FAVICON if you want to be sure that it is going to work properly. You can create a FAVICON with a larger number of pixels, but currently there are no internet browsers that use anything bigger than that. If you provide FAVICON files that are larger than 16 x 16, the user's internet browser should take one of them and scale them down to 16 x 16, but why take the chance? Often there are unpredictable distortions that occur to the images when they are scaled down to such a small number of pixels.

If you do not have an application that can create Microsoft Windows Icon files, you will have to purchase one to accomplish this for you. Like always, some are going to cost more than others so be sure to check the features of each and look for reviews on their ease of use. You will also want to be careful as not all icon editing programs can handle converting all types of image files for you.

After you have completed creating your FAVICON in your favorite Microsoft Window Icon editing program, you will need to put the file in the root directory of your web host. Be sure that the file has been renamed to favicon.ico as web browsers will not be able to pick it out if it does not have this name. To prevent issues with the file when uploading it to your web host, make sure that when using an FTP program that you have the transfer set to binary rather than ASCII. If you are using a web based administration panel to load files to your web host, be sure to rename the file to favicon.gif and then transfer the file. Once it has been loaded onto the server, you will need to rename it back to favicon.ico. These will save you problems with the file getting corrupted during the transfer to a web host.

If you have done everything correctly, provided that you have your own domain name, you should be able to see the FAVICON when you browse to your website. If you do not, you can try clearing your browser cache and revisiting the website.

There are a few things that you can do if your FAVICON does not show up at this point.

If you do not have your own domain name, if you want to have a different FAVICON for each of the different directories that you website has or if you want to be able to name your FAVICON file something other than favicon.ico you can accomplish this by doing a couple of simple things.

If you would like to use the same FAVICON for your entire website, you may need to put the favicon.ico file into every directory that your website has on the web host.

If you do not want to put a file in each directory or if you want to have a different FAVICON for different pages of your website, you can use some HTML code at the beginning of each web page that will link the shortcut icon that you wish to use. In order to do this you will have to enter some HTML code on every page of your website, which can be a daunting task if you have created a large website already.

Once you have created your FAVICON and loaded it properly onto your website, visitors to your site will be able to see it in the address bar when they visit your site. It will also appear beside the favorites entry when they bookmark your site.

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