Contents - Index

Create Web Site Icon

You may use IconForge to create an icon to display next to your web site address when a user bookmarks your site. Aside from distinctively branding your link in their Favorites lists, you can also look at your site's downloads for the icon files to determine how many of your visitors are actually placing your web pages in their bookmarked lists. Not all browsers display Favorites icons, but they can still be extremely useful.



There are 2 methods to create a Favorites icon:

 - Create a Site-wide Icon -
  • Create your icon (see Tech Tip below);
  • Go to the File menu and select Save As;
  • In the File Name field, assign favicon.ico as the new file's name;
  • Copy this favicon.ico file to the root directory of the server which contains your web pages. If you do not have access to the root directory, you should place this file into each directory which contains your html pages.
    Note that some sites do not allow you to store icons. In such cases, you can upload your icons to one of the many free services, and then use the method described below to point to your icon(s)

     - Create Icons for Individual Web Pages -
  • Create your icons (see Tech Tip below);
  • Save each icon using the .ICO File Type, and using any File Name you like;
  • Copy these .ICO files to a publicly accessible location on your web server (or on another site, if your ISP does not allow you to store icons);
  • In each document, you will need to create a link in its Header section to point to the location for that page's icon (the Header is the area between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> markers). You can automatically generate the code to cut/paste into your document by clicking on the yellow Generate Web Code icon at the top/right corner of the dialog (see illustration above). You can also do this manually by inserting a line into your document which reads:
    e.g. <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http//www.yourURL.com/yourICON.ico">

    Substitute your web address for "yourURL.com" and substitute your icon's filename for "yourICON.ico"

    Tech Tip 1: When copying the icon to your web site's server, be sure to set your FTP client (or other software used to transfer the file) to transfer using Binary mode. If you use the ASCII transfer mode (which is used for transfering text and HTML pages), your icon may become scrambled in the process.

    Tech Tip 2: Favorites icons can appear in several locations throughout Windows (URL address, Favorites bar links, etc.). As the icon will be displayed at various Sizes and Color Depths, you may wish to use a Multi-resolution Icon to ensure that Windows automatically chooses the best icon for each situation.

    {button ,ALink(Howto)} More "How To" topics