That Final Touch: The Favicon

After writing my last blog entry here, I looked at the image I uploaded.  After doing a little extra work, by the time I actually had a good screen capture shot cropped and saved, the Chrome tabs didn’t even display any letters.

Chrome is only showing the favicon (the website’s favorites icon), in the tab for each open page. The browser tab for each page shrinks as we more web pages available, and there is no room for an actual title.  FireFox (the second browser app which is overlaid underneath Chrome’s tabs) also showcases the favicon, even though it displays a word or two of the title. So, your favicon is the final means of leveraging your brand and identity with a tiny rendition of your logo or some other iconic image.

Take a gander at how the favicon for each site listed in Chrome (and FireFox) is still listed. In Chrome, it will be the very last thing displayed as you increase tabs, until the tabs are so small that even the favicon won’t display.

But, when we get to that point, all those open tabs will become a giant resource hog. Yet, any modern computer with a decent amount of memory is capable of doing this, and we usually take advantage of this capability.  The point I am trying to make here is that the favicon is that one lasting image distinguishing your brand from all the others.

Even though FireFox protects the tab size at some minimal size by introducing a means to scroll through the different tabs, the title of the page is reduced to a word or two and the favicon, if available, remains your website or blog’s brand showcase.

So, if you don’t already have a favicon on your website, I have a great tool for you! 😉 You can easily create one by using my online faviconvert utility!

For your absolute best results, I recommend coming up with your best 32 pixel by 32 pixel reduced size image using a quality program such as Photoshop (use the “Bicubic Sharper (best for reduction)” option to resample the image in the Image Size dialog window).  Then, reduce that again to 16 by 16 for the final favicon image.

Favicon will resize your image for you if you don’t have Photoshop.  But its hard to beat the impressive power of such a professional image manipulation software application if you have it available, even if you only have the consumer version (it will use the same reduction resampling engine).

The faviconvert.com utility doesn’t actually convert your image into an icon, but it uses your image (gif, jpg, png or a 24 bit transparent png file format) to convert the data into a favicon and provide it in a few formats that you can download together in a zip archive.

Faviconvert.com