tips and tricks - favicons

Have you ever noticed some websites have a little icon when you bookmark them in Internet Explorer.

Here is how to do it for your site.

1. You need to create an icon which is 16 x 16 pixels and 16 colours. There are special icon editors to do this task or some graphics packages allow you to save to the .ico format.
2. Save the file with the name favicon.ico.
3. Place your icon file in the root directory of your website.

That's all there is to it. You can find additional information about the feature at www.favicon.com including an icon image generator.

There are a few things to note when creating a favicon, all of which are listed in the FAQ section on the Favicon website.

In the panel above there is an example of a favicon we created, using the icon generator, which took no more than one minute!

In reality the icon is much smaller than this and therefore the image looks sharper. An example of how a favicon looks in Internet Explorer is displayed above left.

Some people have difficulties displaying the favicon and we would therefore recommend using the favicon website generator and follow the suggestions on the website.