Visual appeal helps when trying to get readers on your blog. You don’t need to add animated logos and flashing text to do this. There are more subtle ways that have become quite easy to implement if you are willing to invest a few minutes to use the tools available. If you are looking for an easy way to improve your blog’s image for your readers, consider adding a favicon. If you aren’t already familiar with favicons, load up any major web page and see the little image next to the URL in the title bar.
Here are some reasons to use a favicon on your site:
- It’s a good way to differentiate your site among many others.
- It can help you to establish or strengthen brand identity, assuming you have a brand.
- It gives a professional, finished look to a website.
- It’s just fun.
First Get The Needed Plugin
First, go get the following Shockingly Simple Favicon plugin here and install and activate it through your administration panel.This plugin is well named and makes the task of adding a favicon to your site very easy indeed. No need to muck around with any html. It also gives you the option to change the favicon for your administrative user, should you want to go that far.
Now for the hard part.
Add Your Artistic Brilliance In 16×16 Pixels
Now we need a favicon. If you have an existing logo already, it’s easy to use for your favicon, assuming it scales down reasonably well.
If not, let’s create one. You could design one in Photoshop or even a simple paint program if you’re so inclined. If you’re not the world’s best pixel artist, then you can head over to http://www.favicon.cc to the Favicon Generator. Here you can you can create your own .ico file straight on the 16×16 canvas with the limited drawing tools. (Create an account to save your work.)
Even simpler, type in your image idea in the search box and find something to use as a base. Try to be original and add something to the icon to create something new, change a color, flip it horizontally or rearrange it in some way.
Another easy method is to find an image and upload it. The program will create a scaled down icon from your image. Be warned that not every image scales down well and you may well have to embellish it a lot to make it recognizable.
Once done, download your completed work of brilliant art and save the file to your computer.
Unleash Your Masterpiece To The World
Use the WordPress Administration panel media uploader to add the file. Copy and paste the saved URL for your .ico image.
Go to the S. Simple Favicon plugin control under Settings and paste in the URL to your icon.
Hit save and load your blog page. You should see your wonderful creation somewhere in your browsers navigation panel.
Now anyone who bookmarks your page will get also save the icon image of your page for their future association to your website. Nice!
Now go try it out on your own blog!
