Have you ever noticed how some websites display little icons in the browser next to their name or URL?

Blogger blogs display the that orange B, Wordpress blogs have the Wordpress W, Google has its Mondrian-inspired g, Collin Douma’s Radical Trust blog has a hand, the UK’s Guardian newspaper has a lower case g that looks remarkably similar to Google’s and so on.

This is called a Favicon, and it is a 16×16 pixel image that you can easily create to give your blog or website a bit more style and identity. In order for it to work across all browsers, the image needs to be in the .ico format, although I’ve heard that some browsers also accept .png files for the favicon.

To create one for your site, use a tool like Degraeve’s Favicon creator. I uploaded an image of BlogCampaigning founder Espen Skoland to use as our favicon, and the online tool did the rest of the work.

Once you’ve got your little favicon created and stored on your computer, upload it to your websites root directory (for example, BlogCampaigning.com/* is our root directory) and it should appear on people’s browswers when they look at your site.

For more on how to do all of this, check out How To Create a Favicon by The Site Wizard.