Favicon : Why Is It Important That Your Website Have a Favicon?

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Favicon : Why is it important that your website have a favicon?

Author : Abhishek

Favicon might look good or bad, other than its look, Favicon has other importances for your website or blog. Favicon came from the word favorite icon, as we know it is an image that designers and developers of websites includes to the sites to serve as an icon beside the address bar and tab of the browsers.

Favicon : Why is it important

When we surf the Internet up to 20 tabs might be kept opened at the same time, Favicon allows us to identify the contents of each tab next to the name of the site.

Favicon has two main functions: to Identify the site and Branding.

In March 1999, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 5 which supported favicon for the first time; that is why the standard Favicon is of ico format : the default icon file format of Windows Operating System. The probable reason was to estimate the number of people bookmarked Microsoft's website through Internet explorer.

The importance of the favicon is linked with usability for the user. The ideal size of a favicon is 16 x 16 pixels.

Favicon, W3C and Browsers

The favicon was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the HTML 4.01 recommendation, released in December 1999, and later in the XHTML 1.0 recommendation, released in January 2000. The standards use a link element with a rel attribute in the section of the document to specify the file format, file name and a location can be specified for any website directory.

Other than ico format, PNG, GIF, animated GIFs, JPEG, APNG, SVG are used; however Opera 7 upwards is the only browser which supports any version of Favicon.

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Method Usage of Favicon : W3C recommends this prototype snippet in the header for XHTML webpages:

" href="http://Example (dot) com/favicon.">

Favicon designing and generators

To design the favicon some developers use several programs like adobe Photoshop; but if you're looking for more quick options, there are some online websites that let you create a favicon in a simple way. It is almost a standard to use the brand or website's miniature logo as Favicon.

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