Custom Favorites Icon

Your Bookmark Icon

Whenever someone bookmarks a website (using a favicon-compatible browser), a tiny logo-type icon is displayed in their bookmarks next to the link to that site.

That icon is called a favicon and you can create one for your own site!

Here's how:

Make a tiny image, no larger than 16x16 pixels with no more than 16 colors.

Name the icon favicon.ico

Put this icon into each directory (folder) on your site that you want people to be able to bookmark.

You can specify a different favicon for each page of your site! Add <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="pagex.ico"> to the page and upload that .ico file into the page's directory.

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Resources

Here are some resources you can use to create your own custom icon.

You can use a free icon editor program from:
Download.com
Favicon.com
IconForge

Or you can use a graphics program:
Microangelo
Paint which comes with Win9x
PaintShopPro
Freeware image editors
IconEdit32 v1.0

If you have to, you can save the file as a favicon.bmp or favicon.gif and then use IrfanView to convert it to an icon file favicon.ico.

Notes

Favicon doesn't work with older browsers (pre IE 5.0 or pre Netscape 7.0). In some browsers, like the new Apple Safari, for instance, the little icon stays in the visitors address bar as long as he or she is on your site.

However, everytime someone clears their cache your Favicon will disappear until visited again.

When you see favicon in your stats you can see how many people (using Favicon-compatible browsers) bookmarked your site. If you see favicon in your 404 errors stats, that means people are bookmarking your site and you don't have a favicon to go with it.