Show me your Favicon

The Favicon.  It’s such a simple little graphic, yet it’s rather important.  In this day and age on the internet of increased spam and internet fraud, every little thing you can do to add to the authority and credibility of your website matters.  In the case of a favicon, it’s actually a simple measure that can make a huge difference.  In an increasingly icon-driven internet, having a favicon for your site is more essential than ever.

I suppose it might help to explain what a favicon is if you’re unclear.  It’s the little icon that shows up in the address bars and on tabs in your browser.  Most companies use their logo as their favicon, but the possibilities are endless depending on what your website is used for.  When you’ve got an eye-catching favicon, people notice.  When you don’t have one at all, people also notice, but not for the better.

Most browsers now utilize tabbed browsing, which has increased the exposure your favicon gets.  Rather than just showing up in address bars, you can also find it on specific tabs.  Some of the primary benefits of having a favicon are increased professionalism of your site, authority and credibility of having a good website, extra branding, and a chance to stand out (particularly in tabbed browsing with many tabs open).

All the major browsers make use of favicons:

Adding a favicon to your website is easy:

1) Create your favicon.  The quickest way  is simply to use an online generator. Dynamic Drive’s Favicon Generator allows you to create a favicon from an image you specify.  It will automatically re-size the image and change it to the correct format.  The automatic process at favicon.cc allows you to draw your favicon and then it does the rest.

2) Upload the favicon.  It should goon in your root directory, the same place that your main index file is located for your website.  Once it’s there it will show up automatically – browsers know to look in that location for the file.

3) If you blog on your own domain, you may need an additional plugin to show the favicon.  For WordPress, the Shockingly Simple Favicon plugin does the trick quite easily.

That’s all it takes, and suddenly you’ve got one more powerful branding element on your site.  It’s well worth the minor effort.