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Marketing Monday #12 – Create a Favicon To Extend Your Branding

Do you know what a favicon is?  If not, don’t worry because I’m willing to bet that you see several of them daily.  A favicon is the small image that appears on the browser tab next to the URL address.  Favicons also appear in the bookmark bar, next to the website name and on your desktop if the website is bookmarked to the desktop. However, the ability for a favicon to appear on a desktop depends on the operating system being used.

Why use a favicon?  Favicons are so small, and seemingly irrelevant, that you may wonder why you should spend the time creating one.  The reason is that they play a major part in building your brand and I’ll tell you how.  People are image driven; we quickly gravitate to images on a page over written words. Therefore, if there is an image associated with your site, your site becomes easily recognizable to viewers. In this day and age, easy identification matters due to the amount of information that people take in at once. Many people browse the Internet with multiple tabs open the ability to identify your site among many others is beneficial.

What do you need to know to create a favicon?  Overall, creating a favicon is simple and something that you can do, yourself. Favicons are small so think about your site and how you want people to identify with it. If the name of your site is long you may want to think about using the first letter of the site name. Many popular sites follow this method. Another option is to use your logo or if part of your logo is a simple image, you can use that.

A Favicon must also meet specific criteria. It must be square in shape and be one of a few dimensions. The various dimension sizes are as follows: 16 pixels by 16 pixels (URL address), 32 pixels by 32 pixels (bookmark menu/bar), and 48 pixels by 48 pixels (Windows desktop).  Once you have your favicon set with the image and desired pixel size, save it as an .ICO file.  There are many sites on the web that are able to transfer a file type (gif, jpg) to an .ICO file if, for some reason, you cannot save an .ICO formatted file.  Lastly, upload your favicon into your site’s main directory.

Take some time this week to create and upload your favicon. If you find yourself struggling or run into any issues contact us for help.