March 16, 2009
A few reasons why default favicons suck
If your host comes set up with a default favicon do yourself a favor and remove it from your files.
You might think it’s a nice gesture on the part of your host but it really isn’t.
The only time you should use a favicon for your website is when you have an icon that is unique to your site. Otherwise it just defeats the purpose of using it in the first place.
Bluehost is a prime example of a host that places a default favicon on new user accounts. The problem is that no matter how good your site is that icon will always be associated with bluehost and a lot of people remember sites solely by their icons, especially in the current days and craze of rss feeds.
Do you think rss is going to go anywhere? I don’t think so. Do you want your readers to remember who you are and keep reading you? Do you want to stand out of the crowd and say “here I am, read me!”? Then change your favicon or don’t use one at all.
No favicon is better than using a favicon tailored for another site.
I can’t tell you how many people leave default icons in place. I can tell you that those who do are generally lost in feed readers and are very easy to be removed from feed readers because a reader doesn’t recognize anything but that icon and *gasp* that icon doesn’t represent what they signed up to read.
But I use highly descriptive feed titles and each post has a superbly keyword rich title! – that won’t save you. That icon sitting beside your titles just makes your feed and posts look like pages or sections of the site the icon really belongs to.
In short, it can be damaging.
It might just be a tiny 16×16 pixel icon but it does more than you think it does. In a sense it’s a big part of your online identity and should be respected as such.
If you’re one of the people using one of these default icons go incinerate it a.s.a.p. or replace it with one that you’ve created to represent your site. If worse comes to worse and you find you can’t create one on your own you can always send a buck my way and let me create it for you.
Have an icon you want to use that isn’t in .ico format? There’s a ton of online generators that you can use at no cost to you, check out the fficial&client=firefox-a" title="Google search results for favicon generator”>google results here.
Need help installing your icon? That’s a simple and painless process, just follow the steps below:
- Upload your favicon.ico (make sure it’s 16×16 pixels!) to the root file of your site directory.
- Place < link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" >(without the spaces) between the head tags in your page code.
- Save & refresh your site to view your icon.
