It really is the little things that can make your website stand out...

Whilst performing a lot of website reviews recently, I have noticed that many website owners are not taking advantage of a simple and important web design feature known as the favicon. The favicon (abbreviation for favourite icon), is a visual representation of your business, and is normally the logo of your business.

So where is the favicon seen?

When users bookmark or save your website to their favourites apart from the title of the website being stored as a link, the favicon image appears next to your link in the users browser. If they also put your website in to their links bar within the browser or drag the favourite to their desktop for easy access, this favicon is used as the icon representing your business website. As well, quite simply, every time a user goes to your website they will see your logo in the url bar of the browser where you type the web address in – AND when they use tabbed browsing, the favicon is next to the website name on each tab…

So as you can see this simple, effective, visual reminder, really helps your website stand out of the crowd, and should encourage users to come back and revisit your site.

Some search engines actually check to see if your website has a favicon, and may use this as part of their ranking algorithm as they determine how professional your website is, which could help to determine whether your website should appear above another. So when they check, and they don’t find one in the default location it may also trigger unnecessary 404 Errors (Page not Found) which we would like to avoid.

Now that you can see how important it is to have this little thing in place, how do you get one?

If you already have a website designer please contact them directly and request them to get this implemented for your website, creating the icon logo, locating this on the server, and ensuring it is in the default location and each page of your site has the necessary meta tag pointing to it indicating that it now exists.

If you need assistance getting this done for you let me know as own internal design/development team Star3Media can assist. This will provide your own customised favicon created and implemented properly across your site.