Sorry, I just gotta rant today. If your site doesn’t provide a favicon then consider yourself guilty of website owner negligence.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I use my Firefox toolbar to maintain links for quick access to my favorite sites. I visit these sites almost every single day. So when your site doesn’t have a favicon I then have to provide a name for your site (versus just displaying the favicon) and that takes up prime toolbar real estate. This pushes other favorite sites off my toolbar and into no-man’s land. Not providing a site favicon for your users is becoming a big turnoff for me.
Personally, if the site doesn’t have a favicon but I still want to try and remind myself to visit the site, I push the bookmark to the tail end of the toolbar so it ends up underneath that little arrow to the far right (aka no-man’s land)… and off my main viewing toolbar. For me, that’s the minor leagues of my “must visit sites”. It’s the whole “out of site - out of mind” theory. And the chances are I probably won’t view your site for a few days, maybe even weeks.
So to those website owners out there who don’t provide favicons, and you know who you are, I implore you - get your act together. Creating a favicon isn’t rocket science. And in doing so you greatly increase your chances of more page views, viewer association to your brand (favicon is usually associated to your logo), and in the end it’s just the right thing to do.
Shaun tipped me to some excellant online resources to create a favicon. Here they are:
- tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
- rhysd.syntesis.org/tutorial/index.php
- www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/
- antifavicon.com/
- www.favicongenerator.com/
Most of these are also found on Smashing Magazine’s site on online
generators: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/11/09/online-generators/
My hope is that maybe one day we’ll have our toolbars powered by our favorite bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or Yahoo! MyWeb (a personal fave) so we can manage our toolbars both online and off and integrate directly with our favorite bookmarking sites. I should take a look into this actually. If you could rank your favorite bookmarks on these social bookmarking networks, then have a plugin that pulls your top ranked bookmarks I don’t see why some custom browser plugin couldn’t provide this. Right now I add a site to my online bookmarking tool of choice, and then if I really like it I add it to my toolbar so I have quick access via my browser window.