Have you ever noticed that when you look in your browser's favorites menu or address bar, there is a little icon next to the entry's URL?
This is called a "favicon" (graphic file with .ico extension) and is placed at the root of your website. Every time you bookmark a website that has its own favicon.ico file, that file will be added to your browser and will appear in your favorites menu and address bar from then on.
At first only large websites had favicons, but now you can create favicons and use them for website branding. The first thing we need to do is create a favicon. Must be 16x16 pixels in size to be viewed in a browser. To create icons, you can use a graphics program called Icon Forge (you can download a free trial version on CNET).
http://download.com.com/3000-2195-10128559.html
You can either create an icon from scratch or import a 16x16 ".gif" or ".jpg" file and save it as a ".ico" file.
Then you need to save the icon with the default name "favicon.ico" and upload it to the root of your website (where your index page resides). After that, we finally need to map the icon to the web page. To do this, add the following HTML code right after the HEAD tag of your page.
link REL="link symbol" HREF="http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico"
Once you did it, that was it. To try it out, visit your website and add your site to your favorites. You should see a favicon next to the title of your bookmarked page. Then enter the URL in the address bar and the favicon will appear to the left of the URL.
(The favicon works with Internet Explorer 5+ and newer versions of his Netscape.)
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This article is freely reprintable. Finally add the following resource box:
Mario Sanchez published The Internet Digest (http:
http://www.theinternetdigest.net) His website and newsletter offering free advice on web design and his internet marketing.
