A favicon (short for "Favorites icon"), also known as a page icon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage.
If you're trying to entice people return to your site from the Explorer's Favorites menu, it helps to prompt them with a special logo of some kind.
There are two routes to creating your icon.
- You can take an existing graphic, maybe a BMP or a GIF, and convert it using graphics software. A decent converter is available for free at Irfanview.
- The alternative is to use a dedicated icon editor. There's one included in Microsoft Visual Studio, and an online Java editor you can try at www.favicon.com . In the long run, you'll probably find it faster to use an icon editor to create your graphic from scratch, rather than converting an existing graphic and ironing out the inevitable bugs.
When you save the .ico, name it "favicon.ico". That's the default icon that Explorer looks for.
If you don't have access to the root of your web site, you have to add the following tag to your web page so that the browser will know where to look for your icon. Unlike before, this time you can save the icon under any name ending with ".ico" We'll use the name "my.ico" and assume that your web site is under the directory "~my_directory".
If you want other pages to have different icons, you can do that too. Name each icon differently, but make sure they all have .ico extensions OR if you want a different icon associated with special pages, use the LINK tag on those pages like this:
Include this code in your webpage between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags:
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON"
HREF="/~my_directory/my.ico">
If you really like this effect, you can create multiple favicon files for different directories in your site. To do this, put a separate favicon.ico file in each directory on the site.
