Why Don’t you have a Favicon?
This may seem trivial, but every time that I reach a beautiful site and there’s no associated favorite icon displayed in the browser, I wonder why the job wasn’t finished. Granted, my favicon isn’t that spectacular… I just wanted to get something up that differentiated my site from others:
Basic Favicon Setup
If you’ve not set up a favicon for your website, it’s incredibly simple. The easiest way is to drop an icon file called favicon.ico in the root directory of your website. It used to take icon programs like Microangelo (a great icon development application) but there are great alternative icon creation tools online!
Simply upload any image file to Dynamic Drive, output the file, and drop it into your root directory. All modern browsers will look for and display this icon in the address bar.
Advanced Favicon Setup
If you’d like to tighten up your site and properly develop a favorite icon, there’s some header HTML you can input. One of my favorite examples of this is DHL’s US website… here’s the icon: 
Here’s the code that they utilized to reference an animated gif rather than an ico file:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.dhl-usa.com/images/favicon.gif" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://www.dhl-usa.com/images/favicon.gif" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" />
I’m not a big fan of animation, especially in icons, but this is a subtle use of the technology that brings some individuality to the site.
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