Indiana Favicon and the Temple of Generators

Tags: basics, favicon, generators, graphics, help, icons, tutorial

What is a favicon? It is that tiny icon you see in most modern browsers, right next to your web address.

Think of it as a visual reminder for the browser of what site you are on. This is really handy when it comes to favicons in tabs, because you can quickly see and think “Oh, there is an ‘m’ there, and it looks like Mitch’s layout - that tab must be where I loaded Mitchelaneous.com”.

Favicon creation is not that hard, as long as you have a good graphic editing program. What you need to remember is keep it 16×16 pixels and name it favicon.ico. Also it will need to be in the root folder for the domain in question - so for example on most Linux-based/cPanel hosting plans for your primary domain name that would be your public_html folder. If it is located somewhere else you can specify a location with these strings in between your <head> and </head> code on your web page:

<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/ico" href="/favicon.ico" />

Going back to the favicon creation, there are several good resource online to help you get this done quickly and easily. Here are some of my favorite favicon generators:

There you can quickly create, edit and download your own personal favicon to use. It cuts some of the work out of the overall chore of getting your favicon ready for public consumption.