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All about
Favicons
what they are, how to set them up, and how to create
them.
What is a favicon?
Microsoft added a feature in Internet
Explorer 5, that allows webmasters to design an icon that will appear
beside their website's title in the Favorites menu.
Many webmasters haven't heard of
favicon.ico, which is why this is a great way to make your
site stick out on somebody's Favorites list.
How do you set a
favicon up?
You simply have to upload favicon.ico
into your main web directory.
If you prefer, you can upload the
icon to another folder, such as images. You would then have to specify
where the icon is located, by adding another HTML tag to your HEAD
tags.
To let Internet Explorer
know where your favicon.ico is located, if not found in your main
web directory, add :
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/favicon.ico">
to your HEAD tags.
Example :
<html>
<head>
<title>PRO Website Management</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword, keyword,
etc">
<meta name="description" content="blablabla">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/www/images/favicon.ico>
</head>
How do I create a
favicon.ico?
You can create an image in any graphics
editor, if you want to. Make sure the pixels are 16 x 16,
and index the image to 256 colors or less. It's recommended
that you save it as a .gif or a .bmp file, because these are the
easiest for the icon editors to read.
Next, you need to get an icon editor,
to convert the .gif or .bmp file that you have created, into an
.ico file. After, that it's a simple matter of uploading it to your
website, as instructed above. Don't forget to rename the icon file
to favicon.ico.
Another way, to create a favicon.ico
is to do it directly in an icon editor and not use any other graphics
editor. This is what I did for my site. You can see that my favicon.ico
isn't very sophisticated. As you'll be able to see if you add my
website to your Favorites(for those of you using
Internet Explorer). :-)
I used IconForge to create my
favicon.ico. You can download a trial version of it. For more info
about IconForge, visit CursorArts's
website.
| About the contributor |
Jonathan
Harbaugh is PRO Website Management's
webmaster.
He also is the designer of the one and only favicon for
PWM.
You can see this unique favicon by adding
his website to your Favorites.
He puts out his newsletter, Awesome Solutions For Webmasters,
once a month
If you haven't subscribed yet, you still can! Click
here to subscribe
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