If you look up in your web browser’s address bar, next to the website address, you’ll see a little picture. This is called a FavIcon (short for favorite icon). The original purpose for it was that when you save a website into your favorites or bookmarks, the favicon picture would be saved there next to the website name as an additional reminder of what the site is.
Eventually, browsers started showing the favicon right in the address bar next to the website address. There are several good reasons to have a favicon on your site and I’ll tell you why and how to do it below.
BRANDING:
Whether your site is for a company or is the main center of your work, you should be branding it. Your favicon picture should be your logo or something descriptive of your site or your company. If it is a company, you should take every opportunity to put your logo somewhere where people will see it. If not and it’s just your site, your favicon will become a logo and branding not only on your website, but in peoples bookmark or favorites list!
Consider that someone may have fifty or more bookmarks in their favorites list. If more than half of them just have the generic browser favicon, then you are instantly going to stand out in the list and draw the eye to your bookmark, begging the user to click on it.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Do search engines rank you higher if you have a favicon? Maybe.
The search engine company’s are very secretive about how they come up with page ranks (where in the list your webpage ends up) and there is some debate as to whether the presence of a favicon will rank you higher.
If nothing else, having a favicon can’t hurt and from a user perspective, could very well help remind people that your website was one they want to visit again.
HOW DO I MAKE AND INSTALL A FAVICON?
Obviously, you must make or download a favicon before you can put it on your site. For this you can either just do an internet search for “favicons” where you’ll be presented with hundreds or thousands of favicons or you can go to a favicon generator site where you actually upload a picture to them and they convert it to a favicon file for you.
Keep in mind that a favicon is not just a picture renamed to favicon.ico. It is actually an icon file that has specificy requirements in order for it to display properly. A favicon generator site that I’ve used successfully is chami.com’s favicon generator.
Once you’ve created or downloaded your favicon.ico file, you need to upload it to your website. Place it in the root folder of your site (the main folder that holds all of your other site files and your index.htm file).
Once there, it may work automatically. Browsers such as Internet Explorer automatically look for it there. To make sure that it will load in all browsers, you can edit the header on each of your web pages and add the following line of code which will force the favicon to load:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>
That’s all there is to it. Give it a try and start making your site a bit more professional and definitely more memorable.
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