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Customising your website's Icon in IE5

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27 Nov 2000 1  
Replace the boring IE logo in your readers browser with an icon customised for your site.

Introduction

It's always nice to differentiate your site from others, and there a couple of places in particular that allow you to make your site stand out from the crowd.

Dragging a URL from the address bar of Internet Explorer onto your desktop creates a shortcut with the familiar blue and white IE shortcut icon:

Adding a site to your favorites brings a similar result.

If your readers are viewing your site through Internet Explorer 5.0 or above then you can make your site stand out for them by simply creating a 16 x 16 pixel bitmap called favicon.ico (using the Visual Studio icon editor, for example) and placing this icon in your web site's root directory.

As soon as the user adds the site to their favorites then IE will scan that website for the favicon.ico and use it instead of the standard IE icon for desktop shortcuts, the address bar, the 'Favorites' drop down menu in IE, the shortcut bar in the taskbar (Win 98+ and Windows 2000), and in the Office Shortcut bar.

You can associate a different icon with a specific page by adding a LINK statement to the HEAD of your page:

<HEAD>
  <LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.mydomain.com/myicon.ico">
  <TITLE>My Title</TITLE>
</HEAD>

Click here to see the icon for Code Project.

License

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