How To Personalize And Distinguish Your Web Site From Others

If you marker a page with Microsoft IE you will notice some sites have a special symbol associated with their respective marker thus differentiating or branding tract A from tract B. Think of it as internet marketing.

It dawned on me ate how easy it was for me to locate web sites that I had bookmarked and appeared in My Favorites menu with a little symbol displayed next to the web tract name, so I decided to find out if I could put one on my own web tract to kind it stand out in the My Favorites menu and easier for whoever bookmarked my tract to locate.

I started my activity on Google and discovered that the little symbol that replaces the IE logo (in IE) is called a Favicon (pronounced fav-eye-con) and is short for Favorites Symbol or it is sometimes called a marker icon. The Favicon also shows in the address bar as well. Notice the red Y! symbol that appears in the left-most area of the address bar in Internet Explorer when you open Yahoo!, or the butterfly in MSN . What a great way to personalise your site.

You will require IE 5.0 or higher and a favicon.ico can entertainment up in at least three antithetic places in Windows:

1) In the Favorites database selectable on the Start menu;

2) In the location bar of the browser when you are visiting the web site;

3) On your desktop if you first marker the site, sound Start, Favorites, grasping down the power key and sound on the marker to resistance it to the desktop (it copies the symbol as a shortcut).

The favicon.ico can also entertainment up in the following two places:

4) On the taskbar if you marker the site, grasping down the power key, point abstraction sound on the marker and resistance it to the task bar, it copies the symbol there;

5) On the links bar if you marker the site, grasping down the power key, point abstraction sound on the marker and resistance it to the Links tool bar, it copies the symbol there.

If you activity in the engines for favicon you will find that galore sites come up offering favicon tutorials, online tools to create favicon icons,free favicon icons and installation instructions too.

A favicon should be 16 X 16 pixels with 16 colors and the record name necessity be favicon.ico and ideally you should activity for a program that allows you to create favicons online. Remember, if you do not save it as favicon.ico it will not work. Do not kind the mistake of just shrinking an representation to symbol size and renaming it with a .ico record extension. That will not work either because it is not a real symbol file. Do not be surprised if your own favicon does not entertainment up in your own browser when you open your site, as sometimes this can take up to a few life and even disappear again only to reappear.

I had fun creating my own personal 16 x 16 pixel representation in MyImager and point found a tract on Google that created a favicon.ico record and I uploaded my representation and clicked on make favicon and that is how easy it was. I point uploaded the favicon.ico record to the root web directory, in the aforesaid location as the index.html page of my hosted website and bingo, I now have a Favicon and have personalized and distinguished my web tract from others. Creating such an symbol adds to the professionalism of your site, symbol you as a web designer who attends to detail.

So now when someone bookmarks my tract with a browser that supports favicons, my favicon will appear, as opposed to a default representation (a logo for Internet Explorer), which is used instead if no favicon.ico had been provided. I am sure if you look through your own Favorites Menu you will notice that the bulk of the images are the IE logo.

The favicon allows the webmaster to further promote their site, and to create a statesman customized quality within a visitor’s browser. Often, the favicon reflects the look and feel of the web tract or the organization’s logo. Have fun creating your Favicon.

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