Free Toolsday 8/26 – MaxBlogPress Favicon
Tuesday
Aug 26, 2008
Every website should have a favicon to stand out from the crowd. What’s a favicon, you say? A favicon is the small icon displayed next to a URL in the address bar of a browser.
I’ve written before about a nifty online tool to generate favicons, but that tool does require a bit of HTML knowledge and can work for every website. This tool, the MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin, works specifically with Wordpress powered blogs to allow the blogger to choose from a gallery of favicons.
There are hundreds of favicons to choose from, so there’s not a chance you won’t find one in the gallery that suits the topic or theme of your blog. This is the absolute easiest way to get a favicon that screams at the user and gets attention fast.
Free Toolsday for April 29th
Tuesday
Apr 29, 2008
Welcome to the last Toolsday for April. Spring is here and it’s time to get organized. I’ve been doing a lot to enhance my site now that I’m firmly cemented in WordPress and I found a super handy tool for one of the most elusive website features for beginning webmasters – the favicon.
Google defines a Favicon as a small icon that is used by some browsers to identify a bookmarked Web site. In layman’s terms, this is the little icon that shows up in your address bar to the left of the URL and in your Favorites or Bookmarks menu beside the website name. Dynamic Drive offers half a dozen really useful tools on their website, but my favorite has got to be their super easy to use Favicon Generator.
Regular image editing software won’t create icons, or .ico, files, something that’s always irritated me. But this handy online tool will take any gif, jpg, png, or bmp file and shrink & convert it into an ico file. Then you just download the file and follow the directions on the page to add the favicon to your website.
For those of you using WordPress, these instructions aren’t quite accurate, so when I used it I did have to do a bit of searching. I found these really easy instructions from the WordPress Codex area. Remember that favicons are another form of branding your website, so using your logo or a slight variation is the most logical step (just take a look at sites like Google, Entrecard, & Commission Junction to see good examples). So take a look, decide on an image, and make your website stand out just a bit more with a unique favicon!
