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May 30, 2006

Web Design: Adding a Favorites Icon (aka Favicon)

Have you ever been scanning over your favorites (bookmark) list in your web browser and noticed little icons next to some of the sites that you’ve saved? can ytou see our little 15 at the top of this page? These icons are called favorites icons or favicons. They’re added by web designers to make their sites a bit more noticeable and to simply give their site a bit of added flair. If you want to add your own favicon so that your site it is entirely possible, and not difficult at all.

To begin, use a graphics program, and create the image you desire at the size 16 x 16 pixels. Indeed, this is very small – probably much smaller than you’re used to – but it is the correct size for favicons. It may take you a few different tries to come up with a version that you feel will work well with your web design.

Save the image as either a BMP or a GIF using 256 or fewer colors. Just like web images, icon files need to be able to display on all types of computer monitors, so you can’t use millions of colors and expect high reliability with the viewers of your web design. However, since icon files are used for display on Windows only, you can successfully use 256 colors instead of the web design standard of only 216.

Once you’ve designed your image, you need to convert it into an icon. To do this, you will need to use an icon editing software. There are many out there, often for free, so have a look at different shareware and free software sites before forking out the cash.

To publish the icon, all you need to do is upload it to the directory file that you want it to represent when bookmarked. You can do this just for a specific page, or for every page of your website. To do this, you just need to add a link reference to the beginning of each of your HTML documents. Our favicon is in the root of our site.

That's it! Simple huh?

Mark.

Posted by Mark at May 30, 2006 7:49 AM