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Customising your website's Icon in IE5

By , 27 Nov 2000
 

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 CodeProject
Canada Canada
Member
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 beginnersmemberthatraja15 Jan '10 - 23:26 
GeneralFavicon.ico not working for asp.net page?!memberjgilbert5 May '05 - 9:28 
GeneralRe: Favicon.ico not working for asp.net page?!memberMaxim Langman1 Jul '07 - 3:58 
GeneralRe: Favicon.ico not working for asp.net page?!membertbetz18 Oct '07 - 5:43 
GeneralOther browsersmemberyorgato3 May '05 - 14:46 
GeneralAuto RefreshsussAnonymous19 Mar '05 - 10:59 
General.ICOsuss[FHD]Grey_fox18 Sep '04 - 0:44 
GeneralHELP ME!!!sussAnonymous8 Apr '04 - 18:15 
Generalsimple but usefulsussAnonymous15 Dec '03 - 0:13 
GeneralWrapper for Refresh ButtonmemberAnonymous6 Jun '02 - 13:39 
GeneralRe: Wrapper for Refresh ButtonsussAnonymous9 Mar '03 - 4:05 
GeneralRe: Wrapper for Refresh Buttonsussmonicb20034 Jul '05 - 0:14 
Generalhelp!memberAnonymous14 Feb '02 - 17:20 
GeneralRe: help!memberThomas Freudenberg17 Feb '02 - 23:46 
GeneralCool!!!memberNish [BusterBoy]11 Jan '02 - 21:01 
GeneralBlehmemberShaitu7 Oct '01 - 7:40 
GeneralIts differentmemberRaghu Ram25 Jun '01 - 22:20 
This arcticle has good perspective for changing icon being onlineRose | [Rose] Rose | [Rose]
 
Raghu Ram
Generalthis websitememberAnonymous15 May '01 - 4:02 
GeneralGreat tip!memberAnonymous21 Apr '01 - 12:34 
General32x32 for shortcuts(large icons view)memberSteve Dunn4 Dec '00 - 23:39 

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