Guide To Create a Custom Favicon
If you are going to put up a website, then you will need to look into setting up all the pieces in a custom fashion. Customizing your website is not just a matter of individuality, it’s matter of business know how. For instance, if you’re a small business and you want to stand out in the marketplace, you will want to set up custom framing within all the individual pieces that you are going to put into place. One of the options that you can easily end up overlooking is that of the favicon. This is a mighty element that you don’t’ want to miss out, especially in regards to today’s internet marketing standards. This is something that could defiantly help you get a little push in the right direction.
What Is A Favicon?
For those that aren’t sure what this is, it’s simple. It’s a 16 x 16 image that you have in place at the top of a URL. If you have this in place, your URL will come after the image is in place. This may seem rudimentary, or perhaps something that doesn’t have much use, but it’s one of the cool tricks of the web that you can utilize right now. Having this in place shows authority, gives people a sense of security, and it looks cool to have in place. A custom favicon is a great little thing to have in place today, and it’s not hard to create.
What’s The Purpose?
The main purpose of this option is to ensure that you have customization in place for your website. You may not think about the favicons that are in place today, but it’s important to have in place. When someone opens a tab, for instance, it comes up, and when someone is on a page that they aren’t familiar with, it can help isolate the authority that you have. Branding is the main thing that you want to have in place when you start a business, or have a site that sells something. Whether you’re into affiliate marketing, or you have a storefront, your page should have a favicon in place.
Creating A Favicon
Right now there are a lot of different ways that you can do this. You could generate one with Photoshop if you’d like. Simply open the program and start with a 16 x 16 canvas. From that point, create your image to fit those dimensions, and that’s it. Once you have that in place, save the file as “ico”, and you will have a very unique favicon that you can put in place. If you don’t have this program or simply aren’t sure how to use anything of this type, then consider looking into a favicon generator. There are no less than 10 of them online right now. Type favicon generator into any search engine and you can pull up a list of options to go forward with.
You can find a ton of free favion generators simply by doing a Google Search.
How To Use Your Favicon
Once you have this designed, you’ll no doubt want to use it right? Well, you can definitely do that by simply going to your hosting provider and uploading the ico file. You can do this through the CPANEL or you could use FTP to upload this. Once you open up this solution, you will want to upload the ico file, and then edit the line of your index file. Open up your index file and simple edit the header area.
Whether you use WordPress or you use HTML, you will want to put in a line of code within the header area, that is a “link rel”. The code is similar to a “href” tag that you would have in place for a link. Once you have this in place, you want to point to your ico file, and then close the tag. That’s it. Once you have that in place, refresh your home page and the favicon will show up in the left hand corner of the URL window, or in a tab that you open up after the fact with your URL in place.
What If You Don’t Use A Favicon?
There’s no real penalty to not using favicons. However, if you want to brand yourself as an expert online, for any niche, then this becomes an important thing. Make sure that you focus on branding at every step that you have online, and you’ll end up with a positive ranking overall. Test this out, and see how a simple favicon can give you a little bit of leverage in your industry. It’s all a matter of authority and branding, and it’s easy to dismiss it.
