Icon, Favicon

Look at the image below of my Favourites menu and the little icons beside the links. They're called Favicons and they're usually filenamed favicon.ico.

What you normally see on your Favourites menu are the famous (and default) Internet Explorer "e" icons in white and blue.

However, as time goes by and as you add links to your 'favorites' list, you are bound to come across some icons that are customised by their webmasters.

Now, to use a favicon on your website or homepage is very easy. Just save your icon as favicon.ico and upload it to the root directory of your web and that's it! For example if your main web page of your web is:

http://www.example.com/index.html

then your favicon will be at:

http://www.example.com/favicon.ico

Some say that you may have problems using a favicon on a FREE web host but it works on Tripod (the only free web hosts I have set up favicons in, so far).

If your web host does not support favicons or .ico files, then there are alternative ways to do it but you just have to ask around on the GIDForums if you're really stuck.

By the way, once you have uploaded your favicon and a reader at your site or homepage saves your web page (any) to his Favourites, he will also see the icon on the Address Bar when he clicks on your link in the future. See the sample image below:

Try it, save this page (or any page of this homepage) to your Favourites folder and you will see my green "J" icon!

Lastly, favicon works only with MSIE and doesn't do anything for Netscape the last time I checked!