How To Make A Favicon

By this time in your life, you have surely seen those little icons in your browser to the left of the website URL in the address bar. Those little 16 pixel by 16 pixel icons are called “favicons.” I guess they are named that way because you see them when you “favorite” a website. By the way, making these words verbs is probably one of the most annoying things in the world to me.

So you say you have your own website. You have access to your server and you want to create one of these cute little favicons and upload it for the world to see. How do you do that? Oh, it’s so easy.

I am going to show you a handy little website where you can create your own favicon. If you visit this website called favicon.ico generator, you’ll be presented with a big square. Each little square in the big square is worth one pixel. By messing around with this one web page for about 10 minutes, you will most likely have created your very own favicon. I am not going to go over exactly how to do this, because I figured it out rather quickly. I have faith in you.

What I did want to go over was what to do once you have created your favicon and downloaded it to your desktop. That’s important. Well, basically you just upload it to your server’s root directory and that’s it. Yeah, there is a lot of chatter out there that says you have to add this code to your page’s meta data, link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico", but I have found that you don’t have to do that. As long as your file is named “favicon.ico,” you shouldn’t have to do anything. The whole reason I recently developed these icons for my own websites is because my server’s error logs were getter filled up with something like, “favicon.ico 404 error file not found.” Every time someone loaded one of my web pages, their browser called for the favicon file and couldn’t find it.

So go ahead and give it a try. There are even some pre-made ones that you can download for your website. Let’s see how you do.