How to use Favicon

Why not take advantage of a little built in feature of the Microsoft Explorer 5+ browser, the Favicon. If you browse your favorites folder you'll see mostly default icons next to the titles of the bookmarked pages, little white pages with blue e's

Like the examples on the right

However, if you use Favicon you can brand your site so that when people view their favourites - your site is immediately recognisable. You also get the added exposure of your icon being visible in the visitors address bar!

The example here shows how a locksmith company has used a padlock as its Favicon

Using a Favicon on your site is very easy to do, basically there are two parts to it. First make your icon, save the icon with the default file name of favicon.ico, then upload the file to the root directory of your domain e.g. www.neurocyber.co.uk/favicon.ico

Every time your web page is added to a visitor's favorites, Internet Explorer will search for this file and place the icon next to the page that has been bookmarked

To make your favicon you need an icon editor as most run of the mill paint/graphic programs can't handle the .ico format. If you don't have one, try this free online icon editor it's easy to use

You're Favicon can be any design you want as long as it's 16x16 pixels and 16 bit colour (you can try higher, but 16 bit is safest), any size other than 16x16 pixels will be ignored by Internet Explorer

More than one Favicon on a web site!

It's possible to display different Favicons depending on which page the person bookmarks your site from. By placing <LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="alternate.ico"> in the head of your html you will now have an alternate icon displayed when ever anyone bookmarks that page (make sure the path to the alternate.ico is correct relative to the html page with this code in)

Extra favicon facts and tips

Although initially this feature was developed for IE5+, it's now supported by newer versions of browsers like the UNIX KDE web browser and Mozilla/Netscape browsers
Some web hosts don't support .ico files. If you're not sure contact you're host and ask them, or to test your server, upload a sample favicon and bookmark your page in IE5+
If you're not sure of your ability to produce graphics, use the text tool to type your company initials, using a similar font and colour as your logo

Making favicon summary

Create or obtain an icon, make sure it's 16x16 pixels and 16 bit colour
Save the icon and call it favicon.ico
Upload the file in binary mode to your server, placing it into the root of your domain e.g. www.neurocyber.co.uk/favicon.ico

To have people see your Favicon they need to bookmark your web page. There is no easier way to help them do this than using a bookmark script on your site