Why Favicons are so Powerful

Favicons are a little trick employed by many web masters, and they are very powerful for making your site easy to find and remember. 

When you visit a page with a favicon, there will be a little picture in the address bar which represents your site.  It is usually a 16×16 or 32×32 pixel sized image, usually some sort of symbol related to your site.  When someone bookmarks your site, they will see this little picture right next to the name of the site. 

It’s an incredibly powerful tool for branding and drawing repeat visitors.  Remember that people are drawn towards images rather than words, and if a user is bored or looking for something related to your site in their cluttered bookmark bar, then your site is much more likely to stand out than everyone else’s. 

A favicon also allows you to do some branding with your site.  If you have a site about making money, for instance, you may want to have an image of a dollar sign.  If your site is about writing, perhaps the image of a letter would work.  Because these pictures are so small, it is nearly impossible to add any details into your picture, but you can create nice looking pictures with minimal effort even in a very simple program like Microsoft Paint. 

Favicons are definitely not a hidden secret anymore.  Major sites like Google, eBay and Amazon have had favicons implemented for some time. 

In order to create a favicon, all you need to do is create a small picture, and save it as “favicon.ico”, and then upload it.  Most newer browsers will automatically load the image without any problems, though if you want to do it the “right” way, then you need to add the following line of code in the header of your web sites:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>

As favicons become a standard part of web design, this line of code may become irrelevant, but if you work hard on maintaining proper web standards, then you must include this line.