"Dave, man, how do you get that sweet little custom icon to appear in my favorite places menu and on the address bar when I visit your site?!?"
The answer is actually more simple than you might imagine. For the longest time I'd seen these little icons popping up here and there. I searched high and low for the "secret method" used to automatically place a custom icon in the visitor's address bar and in the favorite places menu, and found it surprising that tutorials on the technique were actually pretty hard to come by (well at least at the time back when I was searching for them).
WHAT'S THE POINT?
There's an awful lot of sites on the Internet, and people are out there "bookmarking" away. But wait... where did that site go that you bookmarked last week, huh? Let's see you sort through your (probably) giant list of favorite/bookmarked sites and find it...
Not as easy as it used to be, eh?
Using this technique, your site will automatically stand out from all the rest. Among all the boring little browser icons will be your site... screaming to be clicked on - the user's eye will automatically move to your link and... presto!
WELL, HOW'S IT WORK?
Ah yes, I'm keepin' ya in suspense aren't I?
Alright here's the "inside scoop" you've been waiting for :o)
The first step is to create a "Favicon" (pronounced fav-eye-con). This is a special image file called favicon.ico which the browser looks for on the server when loading a page on your site.
HOW DO I GET/MAKE ONE?
Well... first you add water, a few spices...
Oh wait, wrong recipe :o)
To generate your own custom icon, pay a visit to Favicon.co.uk (or if you'd like, check Google for some other icon generators.
The page has a special tool which will allow you to design your own icon, and e-mail it as an attachment to the address you specify. Easy as pie... well, almost :o)
WHAT'S THE CATCH?
- Unfortunately, at least for now the only browser that supports Favicons is Internet Explorer 5.0 and above. This is certain to
change in the near future, however.
- Also, it is difficult for the icon to show up for those who have previously bookmarked your site... but don't worry, everyone from here on out will see your great new icon when they bookmark your site.
- Some servers (especially the free ones such as GeoCities) may not support Favicons. In this case you might try storing the favicon.ico file on a different server that "does" support it, and use the following tags on your page to "reference" the file:
<HEAD>
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.site.com/favicon.ico">
<TITLE>My Title</TITLE>
</HEAD>
(obviously change the address above to the proper location for your own host/server). You may also place the above code on every page within your site, to ensure that the icon is used on those as well!
Now your site will pop out more visibly when people are browsing through their archives of bookmarks... and with any luck, this will help the number of returning visitors to your site increase! (not to mention it's just pretty darn cool hehe)
