Visiting the web pages of Google, Yahoo or wikiHow you will notice that there is a small icon placed on the left of the address bar or the header of the browser tab. It is a "favicon", a word born from the contraction of the English words "favorite icon", and the best part is that you can create your own personalized favicon. This little trick, in addition to giving your website a more professional look, will be used to mark your web pages that users will add to their favorites. This way people will be able to locate your pages faster and easier.
Steps
Step 1. Create an image consisting of 16x16 pixels
You should choose a very simple subject as per the image so that it is instantly recognizable.
Step 2. Convert the image to a file called favicon.ico
The file that will contain your favicon must have exactly the name indicated. Otherwise the browser will not be able to find it. A quick and easy way to perform this step is to use the Dynamic Drive FavIcon Generator web service. Alternatively, you can use a free image editor, such as GIMP, and save the 16x16 pixel image in ICO format.
Step 3. Upload the newly created ICO file to the server hosting your website
Step 4. Add the following code to the HTML pages of the website
You should insert it inside the source code section and make sure that the path where you stored the ICO file is correct based on that of the web page in question. The HTML code is as follows (assuming the HTML file and ICO file are stored within the site's root directory):
Step 5. Refresh your site's page view and admire the beautiful favicon appearing next to the address bar or browser tab header
Advice
- Even if favicons are really tiny, make sure users are able to see the content and understand it.
- If you are using a Linux computer, you can perform the file conversion directly from the operating system. Choose the image you want to turn into a favicon, open the system command line, access the folder where the image is stored and type the following command: convert [image_name.png] -resize 16x16! favicon.ico (replace the [image_name.png] parameter with the correct name of the file that contains the image to be transformed into a favicon).