By DV Reddy
A favicon.ico or favicon which is short for “favorites icon”, can be interpreted as a shortcut icon, websites icon, icon of the URL, or icon for the bookmark. It is general a square icon of the size 16×16 or 32×32 pixels. Microsoft was the first to introduce the favicon in Internet Explorer 4. In the original Microsoft standard, a file called favicon.ico was placed in the root directory. If you wish to see the origin, legacy or technicalities of this subject we do advice you to see Wikipedia for more info.
Let’s see if we can’t beat around the basics about favicon with few questions.
What does a favicon do?
It sits somewhere in your website quietly. A modern browser shows the favicon next to the website’s URL which you type in the address bar field.
How does a favicon help?
Often a majority of designers consider favicon as a part of the template design process. Instead of ignoring the favicon as an unimportant part, if integrated successfully into the website it can simply enhances the visibility of the website in a mutitabbed browsing environment and a user could easily distinguish the tabs representing various sites in use at that point of time.
Do I need a favicon?
“A picture is worth a thousand words” and in this website we might use this quote a 100 times more. Looking at the speed of internet browsing and various modern browsers. Many people use multi-tab browsing where a favicon-based tab might stand out.
If your website uses a specific colour theme, a logo or an industry specific content…..then why not use a favicon…may be it will add to that professional outlook of your website. Well I also see many of the content writers ignore basic colour theme of the websites and also a whole bunch of keywords are dumped on the user saying that I don’t care for images as the search engines can’t read images. But it is you and me and a whole lot of humans who actually want to see neatly presented content with images, icons, clip art and ofcourse a favicon. And I repeat “A picture is worth a thousand words”
How do I install a favicon?
Usually a favicon is coupled with web pages, it can be installed in a website by various means. Even though,if a favicon is not integrated by the template designer or your website designer if you can access the server,the favicon.ico icon can be put on the server into the same directory as the web page. There might be some help pages depending on which software system or CMS.
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