Perfecting Your Website’s Favicon
Web design is all about the details. Having a consistent layout, look and feel add to the user experience. Even the most minor of details can make your site that much better. The favicon is no different. It fits into the look and feel of your site, and makes it much more complete. If your website was a package, then the favicon would be the pretty bot on top.
What is a Favicon?
A favicon is the little tiny image or letters that appear next to your url in the browser. It is the unique symbol or letters that signifies that your user is on the right site. When you like a site enough to bookmark it later, the favicon will appear in the bookmarks section. Is makes it easy for people to find your site, because they will remember what you favicon looks like. I have tons of bookmarks to sift through, and having a nice favicon make it easy for me to sift through all of my bookmarks quickly.
A favicon is small, being either 16px x 16px or 32px x 32px. It will appear in a tab if you are using Firefox. It will also appear in the favorites menu of your particular browser.
Creating a Favicon
You can build a favicon in just about any image editor. You will have to convert your file later, but the initial creation can be done in a program such as Photoshop. You can start by creating a new document that is either 32px by 32px, or 16px by 16px. I would suggest starting out at the larger size, because most browsers will shrink the icon to fit its purposes. The larger size would be using for displaying larger icons. Whatever browser you are using, it will size the favicon down to the proper format.
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