Hvassing.com

Using Firefox I open more tabs than I need, in fact I open almost every new page I visit in a new tab. This allows me to go back to the previous page without using more of that precious bandwidth of mine -- bandwidth is expensive in Tanzania. So when poking around the Web there are numerous tabs open, when I reach 20 tabs the title of the site is impossible to read and FireFox replace it with three dots instead. At about 30 tabs these dots are no longer visible either. This is when the favicon does its magic.

A favicon (short for "Favorites icon") is basically a small icon on the size of 16x16 pixels that reflects the identity of the homepage, however the requirements are different from browser to browser and thus creating a wide range of icons might not be such a bad idea. These small icons were introduced by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 5 and has been adopted by all the noteworthy browsers on the market.

"They have no special Web server requirements and are a great way to add brand recognition"¹. So they don't really do anything, save from telling me which tab belongs to which homepage and let me easily click on the one I need. The alternative is to go through all the tabs in a desperate attempt to find the one that I'm looking for.

So why don't more sites use them then? These small icons (which are actually quite difficult to make) helps me, the user, a great deal They add that little extra to the site. And considering that they conform to web standards there is absolutely no reason to why webmasters shouldn't use them. They, as Microsoft say, build brand, and incorporate their logo into your subconsciousness -- where it stays. The favicon can then be displayed on the blogs that you send a pingback to, or vice versa. It can be included in a number of different ways and it works.

Take the favicon at the homepage of University College of Telemark, not only does it look great, it works. It reflects the rest of the site and its design. Their favicon ("hit" means "here" in Norwegian by the way) does exactly what it is supposed to do!

So to all you webmasters out there who haven't got a favicon yet, create one -- now! For more information about favicons have a look at WikiPedia's article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon

¹Microsoft. "How to Add a Shortcut Icon to a Web Page." MSDN. 2005. Microsoft, 25 Apr. 2006 <http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/Author/dhtml/howto/ShortcutIcon.asp>.