by Cynthia Minnaar

With the ever-increasing number of Web sites on the Internet, why not take advantage of this simple method of being able to personalize and distinguish your Website from others?

If you bookmark a page with Microsoft IE, you will notice some sites have a special icon associated with their respective bookmark, thus differentiating or branding site A from site B.

Think of it as a form of Internet marketing.

It dawned on me recently how easy it was for me to locate Web sites that I had bookmarked so they appeared in My Favorites menu, with a little icon displayed next to the Website name, so I decided to find out if I could put one on my own Website, to make it stand out in the My Favorites menu and, thus, make it easier for whoever bookmarked my site to locate it.

I started my search on Google and discovered that the little icon that replaces the IE logo (in IE) is called a Favicon (pronounced fav-eye-con) and it's short for Favorites Icon, or it's sometimes called a bookmark icon.

The Favicon also shows in the address bar. Notice the red Y! symbol that appears in the left-most area of the address bar in Internet Explorer when you open Yahoo!, or the butterfly in MSN.

What a great way to personalise your site!

You will require IE 5.0 or higher and a favicon.ico can show up in at least three different places in Windows:

1) In the Favorites list, selectable on the Start menu;

2) In the location bar of the browser, when you're visiting the Website;

3) On your desktop, if you first bookmark the site, click Start, Favorites, hold down the control key and click on the bookmark, to drag it to the desktop (it copies the icon as a shortcut).

The favicon.ico can also show up in the following two places:

4) On the taskbar, if you bookmark the site, hold down the control key, then right-click on the bookmark and drag it to the task bar, it copies the icon there;

5) On the links bar, if you bookmark the site, hold down the control key, then right-click on the bookmark and drag it to the Links tool bar, it copies the icon there.

If you search the search engines for "favicon," you will find that many sites come up offering favicon tutorials, online tools to create favicon icons, free favicon icons and installation instructions.

A favicon should be 16 X 16 pixels with 16 colors and the file name must be favicon.ico. Ideally, you should search for a program that allows you to create favicons online.

Remember, if you do not save it as favicon.ico, it will not work. Do not make the mistake of just shrinking an image to icon size and renaming it with a .ico file extension. That will not work, either, because it is not a real icon file.

Don't be surprised if your own favicon does not show up in your own browser when you open your site, as sometimes this can take up to a few days, and it might even disappear again, only to reappear.

I had fun creating my own personal 16 x 16 pixel image in MyImager and then found a site on Google that created a favicon.ico file. I uploaded my image and clicked on "generate favicon," and that's how easy it was.

I then uploaded the favicon.ico file to the root Web directory, in the same location as the index.html page of my hosted Website and -- bingo! I now have a Favicon and have personalized and distinguished my Website from others. Creating such an icon adds to the professionalism of your site, marking you as a Web designer who attends to detail.

So, now, when someone bookmarks my site with a browser that supports favicons, my favicon will appear, as opposed to a default image (a logo for Internet Explorer), which is used instead, if no favicon.ico has been provided.

I am sure, if you look through your own Favorites Menu, you will notice that the bulk of the images are the IE logo.

The favicon allows the Webmaster to further promote his or her site, and to create a more customized appearance within a visitor's browser. Often, the favicon reflects the look and feel of the Website or the organization's logo.

Have fun creating your Favicon!

Cynthia Minnaar works from home online and invites you to visit www.cyns-home-biz.com for Web income generating ideas and opportunities, articles and marketing tools.