Using a Shortcut Icon on your Website

A shortcut icon is displayed by the browser for the tab corresponding to your website. It gets its name from the icon that was associated with a saved link to a web page.

For consistency, each page should have the same icon. The icon should be in .ico format. Other formats might not be seen by a visitor.

Prepare your icon using the GIMP. Icons are only few pixels squared in size (32x32 for example) but you can work on a larger size and then scale down when ready. Save this in .ico format.

To specify an icon put lines like this in your HTML:

<head>
  <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://computername/myshortcuticon.ico"/>
</head>

You should now have a customised icon displayed on the browser tab for your site.

Last updated: 20120111-14:57