A Favicon is a shortening phrase for Favourites Icon, it is an icon that’s used to represent a website or webpage. You can create these icons easily and many of the new browsers make use of these. When the favicon was first introduced it would show a little icon that the website owner designed in the persons bookmarks. It would only show up in their bookmarks and know where else. With recent browsers that have come out for IE and FireFox the capabilities of the Favicons have grown tremendously. You can now see the favicon making its way all over the place, I have come up with a list of where this icon now appears in most FireFox and IE browsers.

1. In your favourites list
2. In the URL address bar – Appears before http://
3. Desktop – You can drag the icon to your desktop to create a shortcut
4. Task bar
5. Link bar

All of these locations will have the favicon icon viewable. Favicons must be made and saved into a favicon.ico file extension. If you don’t save it this way then your icon will not work at all, and you will have to change it. So make sure the extension is right. The favicon should be 16×16 pixels with 16 colours in it. There are some programs you can use online that will create favicon’s for you.

Favicon’s aren’t a proven science by any means yet and they still can’t even be viewed by all browsers. They use to help website owners in finding out how many people bookmarked their site, now that the favicon appears in so many different locations it is useless for any type of information gathering. It is now used as a means to distinguish your website and make it unique from all the others. All of the major traffic websites have these favicons for example MSN, Yahoo, and Gmail. All of them have a very unique feel to them and it helps people understand where they have been before. It’s easy to recognize these icons once you have seen them enough times, maybe that’s why they are starting to appear everywhere.

If you’re interested in making your own favicon.ico file then you can on the internet easily at many different websites. It doesn’t cost anything to make these at the sites it’s all completely free, and once you have made one save it to your computer so you can use it for your own website. If you don’t know how to upload the favicon.ico file to your website I’m going to tell you how quickly. You will want to upload your file into the root directory, in the index.html page. That’s all you have to do in order to have a working favicon, although if you don’t see it pop-up on your site right away don’t panic as it can take a few days to appear and sometimes vanishes for know reason. Now when people are visiting your site and viewing their favourites, they will be able to see your favicon instead of a default image. This can be a great technique for trying to brand yourself, make your icon stick out from the rest and be unique. You will want to make the favicon very stylish so that people will like it, you won’t want to get an unmemorable icon as then it’s just making a worse name for your site then the default image would. Since these favicons are completely free I would suggest anyone with a website to make there own and upload it to their website. It can either make a killer impression or terrible impression, let’s hope it wins you more customers, and clients. If you’re interested in making your own favicon then you can get some more information at favicon.com