If You Don’t Have A Favicon, Your Users Will Forget About You

September 16th, 2007

This statement is extreme and not entirely true, but consider it for a moment. What is one of the most important aspects of of becoming successful? Good branding. Making an image for yourself that stands out from the crowd. A favicon is a 16px by 16px image that helps to do just this. So, if you don’t have a favicon or don’t even know what one is, or you do but are not really what its use is, read on.

A favicon, as I stated above, is a 16px by 16px .gif or .png image of your designing. It’s the little picture you see right before a website’s URL in your browser. For example, if you look at the address of this site, you will notice a small, blue image with “aP” written inside of it. Nothing fancy, just the first letters of my website’s name. But it’s something unique to my website. Key word, unique. So why are favicons so important?

I said that one of the most important aspects of becoming successful is good branding. Take a moment to think of some of the major companies or organizations that you know of, and see if you can associate an image with them. I bet you can. Take, for example, the Pepsi girl (or for a brief period, Brittney Spears, ugh), the Coke polar bears, or John Deere’s deer (surprise surprise). All are examples of some unique image that a user or client associates with their brand.

Now this example is a little extreme - I’m not saying that adding a favicon to your site is suddenly going to propel you into the public spotlight and make your name common household knowledge (I’ll tell you how to do that later…). I’m trying to point out that all branding, however big or small, is just as important. If you’re going to spend the time, energy, and money to create a custom, fancy website layout and a nice spiffy logo, why would you bypass taking three minutes to add a favicon, too?

But here is possibly where the best aspect of a favicon comes into play - they show up right before your website’s title in browser bookmarks. That means when some user is looking through their list of bookmarks, your plain text website URL (that won’t attract the user’s eye anymore or less than the dozens other URLs listed) won’t be the only thing that is shown. Rather, your favicon will be displayed right in front of it, and this is like a magnet to the eye - and your URL is more likely to be the one he or she clicks on!

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