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Favicon - Favorite Icon

Favicon is short for 'Favorites Icon'.
You can customize the Icon(s) in the browsers 'address box window' and 'bookmark listing'. Hence, when people look at their browsers bookmarks they will be drawn to your web page because of the beautiful logo next to your bookmark. Plus when they view your web site. They can confirm that they are viewing your web site by seeing your customized icon(s) in the browser 'address box window'.

The size of this picture is 16x16 pixels, uses only 16 colors, and with the extention .ico.
It's not a renamed .BMP, .JPG or .GIF-file, you have to convert it to Microsoft Windows Icon (ico).
(Some browsers also accept a gif, but it is not a good practice)
One tool to convert is IconForge.

TIP: Take advantage of the transparency option. This will allow your icon to stand out as a noticeable shape, instead of being enclosed in the standard square box. (The background colour of the page shows through transparent pixels.)

It can be enough to place the icon in the same directory as the HTML-file. But you can also include the following to be sure.

The best place for favicon.ico is in the root directory. Most browsers will look for it there.
But you can change it, if you wish to.

<HEAD>
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="/pics/favicon.ico" TYPE="image/x-icon">
</HEAD>

 

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