Creating Icons for Your Site

Icons are a great way to establish an identity for your website. On nearly all browser, when you set an icon for your site it will appear next to your site's URL and next to a bookmark.

Icons are small (16x16) graphics files saved with the extension .ico. They were first used on Internet Explorer and most browsers haves ince added support for website icons. Many now even allow for different formats such as GIFs or PNGs.

Icons are saved as "favicon.ico" in your website's root directory. Even though many browser now support other filetypes, we're gonna stick to the more widely supported .ico format.

To design your own icon in photoshop, download the icon maker plugin from telegraphics.
You can use the Easy Icon Maker specifically for creating icons.
You can use Fx Icon Maker, also a specialty app.

Some of these apps allow for creating larger icons for other uses, but make sure you choose the 16x16 icon for websites. Internet explorer 5.5 and up supports 32x32 icons but there are several browsers that don't support that size.

If you want to create different icons for different pages of your site, put the following line of HTML in your page's header.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/youricon.ico">

I have also created an easy web based icon maker, available under the tools section of EJ Web Development. The tool is pretty nifty, it will take any gif, bmp, jpg, or png and resize and convert it to a favicon.