Favicons are good because they set your site apart from others in your visitors bookmarks. What’s a favicon? A favicon is that little symbol you see to the left of the URL in your web browser.
The easiest way to build a favicon is through these guys; http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ Whats cool about that place is that you can create an animated favicon as well, much like the one we have for Spilled Milk. After creating and downloading your favicon, you’ll need to upload them to your server.
If you are hosting with Showit, then just drag and drop the favicon.ico into Showit. You won’t be able to have the cool animated favicon, but at least you’ll be able to have a normal one. It will automatically go where it needs to from there.
If you are NOT hosting with Showit, you can upload the favicon.ico and the animated favicon to the directory where your html files are located. There’s one little hack that you’ll need to do to the index page of your Showit Site. This is only to allow the animated favicon file to show, and is not necessary if your just displaying a static favicon.
You’ll need to export the site html of your Showit Site. Next, open up the index.html page with notepad, or preferably the free Notepad++. Paste the following chunk of code after the </style> tag, and before the </head> tag;
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” >
<link rel=”icon” type=”image/gif” href=”animated_favicon1.gif” >
Check out the screen shot below on exactly where to place this chunk of code.
When finished upload your new index.html page and replace the old one.
Congrats! You know have an cool favicon to identify your site in a bookmark list!
Hey Nick,
For a static favicon, does it matter where you drag and drop the favicon.ico in Sites? Can you just upload into the media gallery or do you have to put it on a page?
Thanks,
Eric
Hi Eric! Thanks for stopping by!
No it does not matter where you drag and drop it too. If you drag and drop it onto the stage (the area you work in) then it will not show up which is fine, it will be in your media library. Let us know if you have any problems and we’d be glad to help.
Got it. I had it in the right place, but had just renamed the extension instead of using “save as .ico” All good now. Thanks for the good info dude!
Eric
whew!!! i just did it. thanks guys and fire ftp!
actually lies. i was looking at my pro photo blog. this procedure does not work at all.
Hi tga, thanks for stopping by. You are aware that this is for a Showit site correct? We made no mention of a blog in this post.
Ok…I’m not real bright at this obviously. I had a favicon made from the link, then added it to my media library. Now I don’t know exactly where to load it. Can you be a bit more kindergarten for me?
Hi Kimla!
No worries! If you are hosting with Showit all you need to do is upload the .ico file and that’s it! It will automatically appear after refreshing your browser cache.
I have refreshed and I dropped it onto my first page. Still nothing.
Should I contact customer support? I can’t figure out what to do next. It gives me the “do not” sign everywhere I try to drag it, except onto the page. It’s still not showing even after refreshing. Sorry to be such a pain, but I’d really like this. BTW: you have some really great products.
Kimla!
Yeah that is super strange, it should show right away after it’s uploaded. You might try contacting support to see what’s going on. Most of our clients have their own hosting so we’re no so familiar with those hosting with Showit as far as the favicons though.