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Licence CPOL
First Posted 27 Nov 2000
Views 156,278
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Customising your website's Icon in IE5

By | 27 Nov 2000 | Article
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

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

About the Author

Chris Maunder

Founder
The Code Project
Canada Canada

Member

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Chris is the Co-founder, Administrator, Architect, Chief Editor and Shameless Hack who wrote and runs The Code Project. He's been programming since 1988 while pretending to be, in various guises, an astrophysicist, mathematician, physicist, hydrologist, geomorphologist, defence intelligence researcher and then, when all that got a bit rough on the nerves, a web developer. He is a Microsoft Visual C++ MVP both globally and for Canada locally.
 
His programming experience includes C/C++, C#, SQL, MFC, ASP, ASP.NET, and far, far too much FORTRAN. He has worked on PocketPCs, AIX mainframes, Sun workstations, and a CRAY YMP C90 behemoth but finds notebooks take up less desk space.
 
He dodges, he weaves, and he never gets enough sleep. He is kind to small animals.
 
Chris was born and bred in Australia but splits his time between Toronto and Melbourne, depending on the weather. For relaxation he is into road cycling, snowboarding, rock climbing, and storm chasing.

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GeneralUseful for beginners Pinmemberthatraja23:26 15 Jan '10  
GeneralFavicon.ico not working for asp.net page?! Pinmemberjgilbert9:28 5 May '05  
GeneralRe: Favicon.ico not working for asp.net page?! PinmemberMaxim Langman3:58 1 Jul '07  
GeneralRe: Favicon.ico not working for asp.net page?! Pinmembertbetz5:43 18 Oct '07  
GeneralOther browsers Pinmemberyorgato14:46 3 May '05  
GeneralAuto Refresh PinsussAnonymous10:59 19 Mar '05  
General.ICO Pinsuss[FHD]Grey_fox0:44 18 Sep '04  
GeneralHELP ME!!! PinsussAnonymous18:15 8 Apr '04  
Generalsimple but useful PinsussAnonymous0:13 15 Dec '03  
GeneralWrapper for Refresh Button PinmemberAnonymous13:39 6 Jun '02  
GeneralRe: Wrapper for Refresh Button PinsussAnonymous4:05 9 Mar '03  
GeneralRe: Wrapper for Refresh Button Pinsussmonicb20030:14 4 Jul '05  
works in IE but what's happend with Mozilla, Netscape?
Generalhelp! PinmemberAnonymous17:20 14 Feb '02  
GeneralRe: help! PinmemberThomas Freudenberg23:46 17 Feb '02  
GeneralCool!!! PinmemberNish [BusterBoy]21:01 11 Jan '02  
GeneralBleh PinmemberShaitu7:40 7 Oct '01  
GeneralIts different PinmemberRaghu Ram22:20 25 Jun '01  
Generalthis website PinmemberAnonymous4:02 15 May '01  
GeneralGreat tip! PinmemberAnonymous12:34 21 Apr '01  
General32x32 for shortcuts(large icons view) PinmemberSteve Dunn23:39 4 Dec '00  

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