About the favicon.ico file and how you can create one.
Ever wonder how some Web sites put their own custom icons in the address bar of the Web browser window when you visit them? Or, if you read your site’s Web logs, why there are so many requests for a file named favicon.ico that you might not have?
As you might have guessed, these two questions are related. The tiny image that appears in the address bar is displayed from the favicon.ico file that should reside in the root directory of your Web site.
There are a number of Web sites that make it easy to create this file based on an existing image, using a Web interface. The one I like is on the chami.com Web site, at http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/. Chami is the maker of HTML-Kit, a “standards-compliant, full-featured and multi-purpose development environment for editing HTML and other Web-related file types.”
Click a browse button to find the image you want to convert to a favicon.ico file and select the file. Then click the Generate FavIcon.ico button. In moments, the image you chose is converted into the proper format and ready to download. Copy it into your Web site’s root directory and add a bit of HTML code to the HEAD section of your Web pages (or the header.php or index.php file in the active theme of a WordPress installation — whichever file has the HEAD section). The next time you load the page, the image will appear.
Cool, no?
Now if only I had some artistic abilities.
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1 response so far ↓
1 Dave // May 20, 2009 at 8:13 am
Love your site! Cannot imagine trying to write 3,4,5,6+ books per year… and keep up with a blog.
I dug into these favicons myself, and it turns out they’re pretty tricky. Creating great images is heard, creating great small images is even harder. I’ve tried it myself by simple scaling. The results are too ugly to mention.
The automatic favicon generators sometimes work, more often in my experience they produce suboptimal images.
In any case, I wrote a post about favicons for WordPress (linked), and helped write a little free report on exactly how to create really attractive favicons. My co-author Roberto and I would love some feedback.
Thanks!
-dave d
Dave´s last blog post: Monitoring File Downloads in WordPress Using Drain Hole Plugin
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