FavIcon Generator
A Favicon is a little custom icon that appears next to a website's URL in the address bar of a web browser. They also show up in your bookmarked sites, on the tabs in tabbed browsers, and as the icon for Internet shortcuts on your desktop or other folders in Windows. And when I say little, I mean 16 pixels by 16 pixels. So if you like a good design challenge try your hand at this one.
All you need to add a Favicon to your site is a Windows Icon (.ico) file usually called favicon.ico that you upload to the main directory of your website. Nowadays, most browsers besides Internet Explorer can use a GIF (including animated ones) or PNG (including full transparency) instead. But since all browsers including IE understand the .ico format, and because it's got a lot of intriguing features that GIFs and PNGs don't, read on to find out how to make one.
More information on favicon
After you've created a neat favicon, it's time to add it to your site. To do so, follow the below simple procedure:
- Upload the generated file ("favicon.ico") to your site. Verify it's there by typing http://mysite.com/favicon.ico in the browser's location, where "mysite.com" is your site's address.
- Next, insert the below code in the HEAD section of your pages, at the very least, your site's main index page:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico">
- That's it! Note that your favicon may not appear immediately after you've completed the above two steps. In fact, it may take a few days, and in IE, sometimes the favicon will disappear from time to time due to a browser bug.
You can use the below tool to create the favicons. This is from Dynamic Drive
If you want to use a GIF or PNG instead, use this format instead (just remember that it will not work in IE):
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.png" type="image/png"> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.gif" type="image/gif">
If your new Favicon does not show up right away, try refreshing the page or clearing your cache or put a '?' at the end of the url, which will trick a browser into thinking the page is new and not cached.
Microsoft IE 6 for Windows will not display the favicon until the URL has been added to the favorites. Or try this trick: go up to the address bar, click on the existing (usually the IE default) favicon, then "jiggle" it a bit and let go. That will reload the page and should get the new favicon to show up.On FireFox, clear the cache and restart the browser. On Opera, just refresh.
