Favicon.ico Information

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Favicon.ico Information!

One thing that is important to do is to get viewers to bookmark your site. If you are hoping for repeat visits it is important that they remember where they were! Haven't you gone to a great Web site and thought you would go back at a later date only to find you can't remember where you were or what the URL was?

So somewhere on your page you should place a statement like: Remember to Bookmark this Site! I like to add it to all the pages as you just never know what page they will find interesting enough to do so. Some articles say to place it on the right hand side half way down the page. This makes it near the scroll bar and only a quick mouse click away.

I personally like the idea but place mine at the bottom. I don't want to be too pushy and this makes a gentler approach. Either way works but just don't do it at the top as viewers have grown immune to banners and ads being there and will tend to ignore it.

Have you ever wondered what that 404 error was in your log files? Usually in the referrer files: /favicon.ico not found. It used to drive me nuts as I am new to having access to log files. I kept thinking what could this possibly mean? So I put in the term at several search engines just to see what would happen and found out. What a nice surprise to find out, a bookmark that will not only help you get additional site recognition and it's free!

This bookmark is created for users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5, for an easy way to remember great sites. When someone with MSIE5 bookmarks a site it is called a Favorite Place. So the icon that is associated with it is called a favicon.ico. So far this is the only browser doing this.

What's cool about it is that this definitely helps your site stand out in the list of Favorites. Having it gives you a much better chance that users will come back to your site. Plus, depending on what type of site you have, a user could drag the icon off the bar and place it on their desktop for quick access! This could be very cool.

For this to work you will need to place the favicon.ico file in all your directories. Or on all your pages. The icon is limited by 16 colors and can only be 16 x 16 pixels in size.

You need to use a special program to create the icon as not many programs recognize the ico ending. There are several freebies located on the Web:

Favicon Icon Generator

Impact Software: Michealanglo™ 98

Web Developer's Virtual Library

You can also download an evaluation copy of Microangelo™ 98 to create it. You can decide to buy it or not but you only have 30 days. I did buy it as I really liked the program and like to have more control then using complete freebies.

After you've created your icon save it as favicon.ico

I added a folder on in our directory called fav and placed my favicon.ico in it. Now typically this is all that needs to be done but for safe measures, and I am always safe, I add this to each page:

Right after the Title Tag in between the Head Tags.

It's pretty easy to do, can't hurt and it might get you some more hits!

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