subject: Why should internet marketers use favicons? [print this page] Why should internet marketers use favicons?
As marketers it is really important that we make our websites as professional as possible and often it is just the small touches that give reassurance to the reader that you are someone who knows what they are talking about.
One of these small additions is simply to add a custom favicon to your site. A favicon is the little square image that appears in your browser (you can see a picture of my favicons by clicking here to visit my blog) when you visit a site, it is also the icon stored when you bookmark (or favourite - hence the name) a page.
Creating a favicon is really easy and anyone can do it as long as they have some sort of graphics software, even mspaint will do. Make sure you don't make it too detailed, remember the finished favicon will only be 16x16 px in size. Save the image as a jpeg and then head over http://www.favicon.co.uk/. This is a great free service where you can upload a jpeg and it will convert it to a ico file (which is the format we need the favicon to be).
If you use wordpress you probably have the standard favicon for the theme you are using but it is incredible easy to add your own and increase your credibility as a leader in that field.
All you need to do is follow these simple steps:
1. With an FTP Client, upload (and replace the favicon.ico file if there is one) the new favicon.ico file into your current theme's main folder.
2. Next upload another copy of the new favicon.ico file to the main directory of your site (i.e. http://example.com/favicon.ico). This makes sure that if someone subscribes to your feed the favicon is displayed on that feed.
That is pretty much it for anyone using an upto date web browser to view your site but to make sure everyone sees your favicon even if they are using an old version of a browser you will need to edit your page header which you can do within your admin panel for your wordpress site.
1. Go to the design section and click on theme editor.
2. Select the header.php file (a good tip here is whenever changing a php file, just in case anything goes wrong, before you change it copy and paste it into a notepad file that way if you do make a mistake you can simply paste the original back - just like clicking the back button!!).
3. Once you have the header.php file open search for the line that contains . If you find it overwrite it with this code:
If you can't find it simply paste the above code after the HTML tag.
Once you have saved the changes your new favicon should be displayed whenever someone looks at/bookmarks your site or subscribes to your feed.
Remember sometimes it is these small touches that make all the difference!!!
