Favicon Advice

One free tool that often gets over looked by webmasters is the Favicon [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon]. The Favicon is a great way to make your website stand out amongst the lists that social book marking sites (such as delicious) let you populate. I for one have huge lists of book marks and the Favicon has become the thing I look for to identify the link.

As well as book mark lists the Favicon is being implemented in other areas as well. Google have recently experimented with Favicons next to search results [http://www.marketingvox.com/google-tests-site-favicons-in-select-search-results-042938/]. I don’t see any reason for them not to implement this at some point so be prepared for Favicon fever as people explore the stats relating to how certain Favicons perform.

Or maybe not? Maybe the average searcher doesn’t give a damn about the Favicon and they base their decision entirely on the textual part of the listing? One thing is for sure, Google seems to be spending a bit of time considering the old Favicon! They’ve changed theirs again [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7839744.stm]. That coupled with the recent tests seems to show that Favicons are on an agenda somewhere. What a pity the Google logo has always been its name in the primary colour groups. There’s no way you’re going to fit that into a 16 by 16 pixel gap!

So what are the other Favicon options that Google could have explored? Well how about an animated Favicon? Something like this [http://www.couleur3.ch/] with the letters rotating would have been nice? Well that’s what I’d have gone for anyway!

There are some sites that don’t seem to be fussed about having a Favicon in place, or at least a unique one anyway! There are numerous forums programmed in the vb system that still have the standard forum logo ([http://www.webproworld.com/] and [http://www.seoworkers.net/] are two examples).

So if you want help creating a favicon it’s very easy. Check out this article:

[http://ma.tt/2003/11/how-to-create-a-favicon/]