Favicon Tutorial

There are a couple of ways to install a favicon image for your website. This quick little tutorial should help you on your way.

If you've found your way to this page, you probably already know that a favicon is a little pixel image file that is called to the web browser when you view or bookmark certain pages. Favicons can be great for branding your website, so be sure to take your time choosing one.

Here are some simple steps for adding a favicon to your web site:

1. Find or create an image that you would like to use as a favicon. 16x16 pixels is standard size.

2. You now need to convert the image to an image with an .ico file extension. There are numerous programs that will do this, but I happen to use Irfanview. Make a copy of your image. Open up the second, copied image with the conversion utility you chose, and then convert, or save it as an .ico file extension. Save the original in your native program format such as photoshop, corel, or gimp. This gives you a spare favicon image for editing later if desired.

3. You can now upload the favicon file to the root directory of your web site. You may need to check with your host to see if they support favicon use.

4. In each of your html pages, within the <head></head> tags, you'll need to add this meta tag:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.mywebsite.com/favicon.ico"/>

This code includes the favicon into the browser window when the page loads. You need to replace "mywebsite.com" with your own web address.

The next time you load your web page, you should see your favicon if you did it correctly. Don't get too upset if you don't see your favicon right away. Sometimes Internet Explorer users have an issue with the browser cache.

If you suspect you are having cache issues with Internet Explorer because your favicon works in another browser such as Firefox, try clearing your IE cache to see if that solves the problem.

I hope this tutorial regarding favicons has helped you. Try our collection of favicons on your website!

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© 2002 and beyond by L. Schoen. This article may not be published or reproduced in any way without written permission. If you wish to link to this article, you are welcome to do so.
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