Favicon.ico

If you've ever surfed the web and reached sites that you noticed had a little picture appear by their URL in your browser or ever added a site to your bookmarks and noticed a little picture next to it you've seen a Favicon. That's pronounced Fayv-icon by the way and it stands for favorites icon, mainly because the icon appears alongside sites within your bookmarks or favorite places.

Sites are not required to have a favicon, but if you do not have one and look within your access logs, you're likely to notice a good deal of 404 errors as browsers searched for the icon. Newer browsers such as recent versions of Internet Explorer and Safari automatically look for favicons upon entering web sites. Older browsers and non-graphic browsers such as Lynx do not support favicons and, therefore, do not look for them.

Creating a favicon is fairly simple and requires little work. Specifications dictate that favicons be 16X16 pixels in size and created of 8-Bit color. To create a favicon, simply open up your favorite graphics creation program, be it Flash or Fireworks or PhotoShop, or any other program, set up those specs, and create your icon. When you're done, save the image. Now you're left with a nice .jpg, .gif, .tiff, .bmp, or other such graphic file version of your favicon. On to the next step.

Favicons are saved in the Windows Icon file format, in other words, their file extension is .ico. You need a graphics conversion program to convert your regular graphic file into the .ico format. This isn't a problem, many such programs exist. If you're lucky enough to be using a Macintosh (as I am), you will want to download a nifty little program called GraphicConverter. This allows you to convert back and forth between any number of file formats (including .ico) quickly and easily. The program itself is shareware that costs only $8 when you eventually register. Windows users can check out a program called Any to Icon 2.0 which allows you to take most basic types o graphic files and convert them to .ico. The program is initially free (Shareware) and costs $19.95 to register. If you're looking for a cheaper or free program, they must exist, check Google. With any program, your final icon should be saved with the name favicon.ico, using any other name (ie. myicon.ico) will not work, browsers will not use images named anything else as a favicon.

After you've converted your graphic to .ico format, you're almost done. The final step is to upload the icon to your main site directory (ie. public_html). Now you're all set. You have a favicon. :-)