Displaying your Logo on the Address Bar
Have you noticed those teeny-weeny logo on your browser's address bar beside the website URL? The advantage of having one is it adds branding and charisma to your website and it also provide a more professional and unique appearance. Once created, not only will it appear on the address bar but it will also be displayed in the Bookmark / Favorite section of the browser if your visitor decided to bookmark your site.
This may sound basic to seasoned website designers but there are still a lot of websites out there that don't have their logo as part of their website. Anyway, let's just have a little fun, shall we?
That little logo that we see is called a favorite icon (favicon), it is a simple 16x16 pixel image using 16 colors, that is named favicon.ico and uploaded into a websites directory. So by the definition itself, the first step is for you to create your favorite icon using any image editor capable of saving .ico files. Design and create your logo and save it as a Windows icon file and name it "favicon.ico".
After saving the file, you have to upload favicon.ico to your website server. You can store it to any directory you want, just remember how to access it later. If your site is www.yoursite.com and you store the file in the root directory, the favicon.ico will be accessible via www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico. If you store favicon.ico inside the "image" directory, then it will be accessible via www.yoursite.com/image/favicon.ico.
The next step is for you to instruct your browser where to look for your favicon.ico file. Open your index.htm(l) or home.htm(l) using a text editor / webpage editor and add the following entry in-between the <head> and </head> tags of your HTML source code:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="url to /favicon.ico">
example: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="www.yoursite.com/image/favicon.ico"> assuming that favicon.ico is residing inside the "image" directory of your web server.
Save your index.htm(l) or home.htm(l) and upload it to your website server. Open your browser and type your URL. If your logo does not appear the first time, try hitting the refresh key a couple of times and you will see your newly created favorite icon being displayed beside your URL.
If you're able to see the logo, Good job and CONGRATULATIONS to you. If not, review the steps discussed above, you might have missed something. Don't you give up until you see that logo of yours. Have fun.
|
