Technology Blog
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
A Favicon is the little image displayed in your favorites and in the left corner of the Address Bar of Internet Explorer when you bookmark a page. The Favicon was first popularized by its appearance in the "Address Bar" and "Favorites Folder" using Internet Explorer. Currently, Internet Explorer 5.x (IE 5.x), Linux's Konqueror and Mozilla/Netscape 6.x (NS 6.x) Web browsers support the Favicon function.
A Favicon is a 16x16 pixel, 16 color icon graphics image with an .ico extension. It can be made in most graphic programs. To make it work you create the 16 x 16 pixel graphic, save it as Favicon.ico and upload it to the root directory of your web site (Upload using Binary Transfer Mode). Then add the following html code in between the heading tags of the web pages where you want the Favicon to appear.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<LINK REL="Shortcut Icon" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/Favicon.ico">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
………………..
………………..
………………..
………………..
</BODY>
</HTML>
There are some common problems with Favicon. They are not permanent and are stored in your temporary Internet files folder. If your Temporary Internet Files folder is cleared, your Favicons will be lost. In some cases, although you have changed the Favicon it is not reflected in the browser, this could be because of the cache problem. The browser may not be refreshing the Favicon. Just click on the browser default icon (In IE it is the blue color "e" symbol in the address bar) or your old Favicon and drag it to the body (Web page document area). This will refresh the Favicon of the browser and show the new Favicon of your web site.