This is a very simple way to distinguish your Blog from everyone elses and that is by having a Favicon appear next to the URL in many browsers such as FireFox or Internet Explorer. The great thing about this is that it takes just a minute or two to setup.

About Favicons

The browsers of today have a facility where if someone visits or bookmarks your website an icon or small picture can be associated with that particular website and bookmark. Browsers try to obtain that icon by requesting for ‘favicon.ico‘ from the root directory of your website. When the favicon.ico file is found, the icon will be displayed beside the web address in the browser address bar and beside the link name in your Favorites/Bookmarks menu. Favicons are usually 16 x 16 pixels or 32 x 32 pixels in size.

Getting A Favicon

There are many online resources for obtaining Favicons, but the easiest way is to create one yourself by visiting the Favicon From Pics site. With this online tool you simply upload any picture and it will be automatically converted to the appropriate size along with additional options such as scrolling text and animated pictures. I prefer to just use the static icon. The file containing the favicon.ico can be downloaded to your desktop.

Favicon Plugin

The Wordpress plugin that is used to automatically show the Favicon can be found at Favicon Head. Simply download the plugin, upload to the plugins folder and activate. Next upload the created ‘favicon.ico‘ to the root directory of your blog and that’s it!

The Favicon should appear the next time you visit your blog. Sometimes it can takes a few browser refreshs for the Favicon to appear and if at first you do not see the Favicon, then click CTRL+F5 on your keyboard to do a hard refresh.

Download

Favicon Head Plugin