Bookmark Icon

Did you know that you can change the icon that is displayed for your site in the Internet Explorer favorites menu? Well, you can and it's pretty simple.

Before you start, you will need to find an icon editor. I use Microangelo, which is a very cool program. Other good ones are Icon Forge and Icon Library And Builder. 

You can also use a graphics program to reduce any image to the same specifications. You may then want to edit the image with one of the icon products listed above to clean it up.

After that, save the icon file in your site directory and include the following code (with "youricon.ico") replaced with the appropriate filename and path) in your web page.

<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="youricon.ico">

To keep it even simpler, you can just name it "favicon.ico". If you do that you do not need the <LINK> tag shown in the example above.

It is important to note that this is only supported by Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher. It also generates errors on some web servers (most notably Apache).  You may also find that many hosts do not support the icon file format and will not upload it to your site.

Here are the answers to some commonly asked questions regarding favicon:

What browsers support favicon?

Currently Internet Explorer 5.0 or above. Netscape does not support this feature.

Why would anyone want to create one of these?

It makes your site stand out a little bit more on a favorites menu.

Where does the icon appear?

1) To the left of the title on your favorites menu.

I created a favicon file and loaded it up to my host but it does not show on my web site. What's up?

If you are on a free host such as Yahoo! GeoCities, MSN or whatever, it is quite likely that the "ico" file type has been disabled. The only way around this is to find a new provider.