The favicon sets the tone for any website. A favicon is the outlook of a website or an icon of a website. Visitors recognize a website by its favicon even if the window / tab is minimized. Does your website have a favicon?
Microsoft introduced the concept of a favicon in Internet Explorer for an icon to be displayed when bookmarked under favorites but it was firefox that took the favicons to a different level. Firefox basically made the favicon as the mini representation of a website.
The word favicon is derived from two ordinary words - “favorite icon”. According to the industry standards, a favicon must be 16px in height and 16 px in width. It is a graphical nightmare to fit things within this area. There was a time when a favicon creation was an expertise, it still is in some parts of the geekdom.
All this introduction is for me to introduce a website that I extensively use to create favicons for my clients. HTML kit is a nice little website that hosts a tool that creates favicons from any image that you provide. All you need to do is have the image on your hard drive. Using their browse button, point it to the image that you would like to use as a favicon. And, BINGO, a favicon is created.
The tool is professionally designed. I state this because when you click on the download link to download the favicon, you will be downloading the favicon which also contains an animated favicon as an added bonus along with instructions on installing a favicon.
Installing a favicon is cakewalk. A favicon has to be named favicon.ico. All that needs to be done for the favicon to be installed is that this file has to be placed in the root folder of the web directory. Thats it. No code, no headache.
But, if you wish to use a favicon that is present on a different folder or a different website, this code could be used between your <head> and </head>.
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
where the href points to the place where the file favicon.ico is located.
Again, if you don’t have a favicon installed on your website already, I would challenge you to create an image file with a size 100px X 100px using photoshop. If you do not have photoshop, make use of freeware like gimp. Once you create this image, store it as a jpeg and go to html kit and upload the image to create a favicon.
At this moment, I would like to request you to submit the websites that you think that has the coolest favicons so we can make a list of the coolest looking favicons. You can submit them by commenting on this post. If you could also tell us why you think the favicon you chose is the coolest, it will give other readers a good taste of favicons.
A favicon might have an area less than 300 px2 but the amount of advertising it does is tremendous. Get one today.
Loading ...
