Adding an Icon for Your Web Site

Most browsers now support associating a small image with your Web site and displaying it in the Address bar, Favorites menu, or elsewhere. These little images are called favicons, which is short for Favorites Icon.

Tips

Favicons should generally be saved in .ico format, an icon format developed by Microsoft that contains various sizes and bit depths of a small image. You can find a useful plug-in from Telegraphics for creating .ico format icons in Photoshop (http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/).

Figure 5.42. The favicon is typically used in the Address bar, Favorites menu, and in Tabs.
Some browsers, but not Internet Explorer, also support favicons in GIF (including animated GIFs) and PNG format. Be sure to use the proper MIME type for type.
Internet Explorer originally required the favicon.ico file to be placed in the root directory of your Web site. This is no longer the case, though browsers may still look there if the link element is not present (or is not understood, say by older browsers).

Adding an Icon for Your Web Site

Figure 5.40. Favicon icons, in real life, are even smaller than the one shown at left. They measure a measly 16 by 16 pixels.

Figure 5.41. Use both link syntaxes to ensure compatibility across browsers.

Figure 5.42. The favicon is typically used in the Address bar, Favorites menu, and in Tabs.

Figure 5.43. Because Tabs are often gray or colored, you may want to make your icon's background transparent.