Making Your Website your Visitors Favorite. It is not what you think.

A Favicon is a short the Favorites Icon. It is a multi-resolution image included on nearly all professional developed sites. With Internet Explorer, it is displayed on the Address line and in the Favorites menu. It allows the webmaster to further promote their website, and create a more customized appearance within a visitor's browser. Oftenly, the Favicon reflects the look and feel of the web site or the company's logo.

When visitors bookmark any website, a little icon shows up in the bookmarks and in the tab display of some Web browsers. This is called the favorites icon or favicon. The procedure for creating the favicon is :

1. Create an image 16x16 in dimensions using any graphics program like Adobe Photoshop. This
is a tiny image, so you should try out different versions until you create an image that will work
for the website.

2. Save this image in a GIF or BMP file format with 256 colors or less. The reason for choosing
the 256 colors or less is that the icon files, like Web images, have to display on the computer
monitors, so they can't reliably display millions of colors. Since an icon file is for Windows
display only, it can be 256 colors, rather than the Web standard 216.

3. Once an acceptable image is created, convert it to the icon format and save it as favicon.ico

4. To publish the icon, upload it to the same directory as the file you want
bookmarked.

5. If you want to put a different icon on every page of your site or point to one icon in
many folders, you need to add a link reference to the head of every HTML document that you
want the favorite icon associated with.

Dallin Horneby is a design professional for a New York Web Design company. He has has helped to establish many successful online Web Design businesses over the past 10 years.