Favicons are one of those finishing touches on you’re website or blog that lets visitors know you’ve made the extra effort to really make it look sharp. Favicons are considered essential to have since it bolsters your online presence and brand with very little effort. So, if you market, a product, service, or yourself, don’t skip this important marketing aspect.
But What are Favicons?
Favicons are quite simply a shortcut or bookmark icon that is typically a 16×16 pixel representative of your brand that is displayed in a browser’s address bar next to the page’s name in a list of bookmarks. And, if you have a nice clean logo that is symmetrical in shape, it’s a good possibility you could create the favicon yourself.
Creating Favicons
So let’s assume that you have a symmetrical logo or company mark in a common file format such as .gif, .jpeg, .png, or even .bmp. But how do we get the favicon standard format (.ico) from a more common one? Thankfully there are several sites on the web that offer the online conversion for free. One of these sites is dynamic drive with which I’ve had very good luck with. Don’t be afraid to experiment. The worst that can happen is that it turns out ugly. Go to dynamic drive and simply browse to the image you would like to create a favicon out of from your systems hard drive and then click the “Create Icon” button. Keep in mind your original image must be under 150 kb.
Another option would be to create one from scratch by visiting http://favicon.cc and build it online in real time. Again, you will have to experiment with what works best for you and your application. Don’t sweat it if the first five you create are junk. Eventually you will find what works and you will have learned along the way.
Uploading Favicons
Once you have successfully created a favicon, you will need to upload it to your website or blog. the how depends a lot on how your website or blog is constructed. For a site that is built and maintained by an IDE such as Dreamweaver, you can simply add the following code to your home page within the HEAD section of the code. Between the <head></head> tags of the HTML.
<link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>
To add one to a WordPress blog that does not take advantage of a framework which includes this functionality, simply place your favicon.ico file inside your theme folder (for example: wp-content/themes/default/) then add this line to header.php insuring that it is placed somewhere between the <head></head> section:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/favicon.ico” />
By including a favicon you sharpen your business presence to take a whack at it and let me know how it goes. Good Luck!
