How to add an Icon to your URL
By Russell Tayler
A
favicon, also known as shortcut icon, website icon,
page icon or urlicon is a small, square
icon,
usually 16×16px in size, that is displayed
alongside
the URL in the web address bar of a web
browser.
Whenever
anyone bookmarks your site, an icon
will subsequently show up on their Favorites
list. When your site is visited, the
icon
will also show in the URL box of the
browser.
Browers that will support these
Methods.
Favicon
Design
A favicon has a 16×16px
size so to design it
it’s advisable to use a larger size such as
128×128px
and then scale it to 16×16px.
Now it's easy to create icons and marquees for
your
web pages with FavIcon from Pics.
Simply select a picture, logo or other
graphic
(of any size/resolution) for the "Source
Image"
and click "Generate FavIcon.ico"
Clich Here
IE5+, NS6+,
later FireFox, Opera versions plus more.
Here are 2 ways to incorporate an icon in your sites
url box.
Method 1
- Select any standard Windows icon file. The .ico file must
be in standard Windows icon file format, or it will be
ignored.
- Rename the icon file to: favicon.ico -- all
lowercase. No deviation from this is allowed.
- Place the favicon.ico file in the 'root' directory on your
web server (where your main index page is).
- Whenever your site is bookmarked, the icon will subsequently
show up on the visitor's Favorites list. When they visit
your site, the icon will also show in the URL window of the
browser.
That's all there is to it -- it's automatically picked up by
IE5 and later browsers.
Method 2
Insert the following LINK tag in the <head>...</head> of
your pages.
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.mydomain.com/myicon.ico">
- Change the path and icon filename to correspond to the
location of the icon file on your site. The icon graphic
filename should be lowercase, no more than eight characters,
and the extension must be .ico. Most people use favicon.ico dont forget to change the highlighted mydomain to
your domain name.
- As above, the file *must* be in standard Windows icon file
format or it will be ignored.
- When you use this method as opposed to Method One above, the
LINK REL code should appear on any page that might be
bookmarked.
- Don't forget to confirm that the icon file is actually where
you say it is in the LINK REL path!
The following is an exact quote from Microsoft®:
"For Internet Explorer 5, the required size of a shortcut
icon is 16x16 pixels. To create the icon, use an icon
editor, such as the one included in Microsoft® Visual
Studio® or one of the many other icon editors available.
Regardless of the program you use, make sure you set the
editor to create an icon that is 16x16 pixels. Otherwise,
the icon will be ignored by Internet Explorer.
Troubleshooting
We've noticed occasionally quirky behavior with this IE5
feature on several systems.
In many cases the icon will not appear on your machine until
*after* you perform the following steps:
- close *all* programs but the browser
- navigate to a neutral site, off your own url
- remove any and all bookmarks (favorites) to your
site that you may currently have
- clear the History and the Cache of the browser
- reboot, clear the Recycle Bin
- reboot again, bookmark your site
- reboot [sigh] again...
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