What is a Favicon?
Favicon stands for "Favorites Icon". It's the little icon beside your site's name in the favorites list, before the URL in the address bar, as a bookmarked website on the desktop, in the "Links" bar and on the windows taskbar.
Why does Favicon.ico Show Up as a 404 in the log files?
I was confused when this first started showing up, if I'd never had a file called that... why were people looking for it? The answer is simple, all it means is that people with browsers that use favicon (Internet Explorer 5.0 +, Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror and a most others) are visiting your site. While seeing a 404 in your log files usually means that a visitor got the dreaded "404 Page Not Found" error, in this case it doesn't. All it means is that the default icon was shown instead of a custom one, your visitors saw no errors :-)
Why should you use a favicon?
Most peoples bookmarks / favorites list is a very cluttered place. Having yours stand out with a nice graphical reminder of your site beside it is a good way to get their attention again.
How To Make a Favicon
There's quite a few good favicon creators for free, a few of my favorites are FavIcon from Pics (within seconds create a favicon from any image on your computer, even an animated favicon!), Favicon.com's online creator, or use one of the popular icon creating programs. You could also make it in your favorite image editor, save it as a bitmap (.bmp) and use Icon Master to change it over to the icon format. (Just renaming the file isn't going to work.)
I'm not going to go into detail here about the actual creation of icons, there are tons of other sites to help you on that if you get stuck.
I will tell you the icon basics. Icons are image files that actually contain one or more images, so a good idea is to make the 16x16 size as well as a 32x32 size. If you want you can make other sizes since xp users can have larger icons on their desktops. Make sure you use the default windows color palette (256 colors), again, if you wish you can make extra images inside it that go up to the XP colors. When you've done that, name your file favicon.ico.
How To Get Your Favicon To Show
There are 2 different ways to do this:
- Method 1
- This is the easiest to do and it will show your icon no matter what page your visitor adds to their favorites. Simply upload your new icon to the main directory of your site, ie. www.example.com/favicon.ico.
- Method 2
- If you don't have access to your root directory (if your on a free server for example) or it you want a different favicon for certain pages, add this to the <head> of your html. (You can name your favicon whatever you'd like with this method)
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/folder-name/logo.ico"> - Or if you prefer to use the full URL:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico">
