How to add a favicon to a Wordpress blog

One of the things I’ve always meant to do for my blog was to create a favicon. After customizing this new theme, I finally bit the bullet and did it!

A favicon is just a little icon that shows up in the address bar of your browser, the tabbed browsing bar, and the bookmark list. In most browsers anyway.

Having a favicon for your blog will make it a lot more noticeable and help it stand out amongst the very large blogging crowd.

Creating a favicon can be fairly simple. I spent about one minute creating mine. I never said I was a graphic artist so I hope you’ll forgive my plain “M”. It’s better than nothing, right?

I use Macromedia Fireworks 8 to create my graphics. I installed a “Favicon” plugin so I could export my 16×16 pixel graphic with the .ico extention, but there are favicon generators online that will help you create one with a few clicks. Just be careful you’re using an image that is your own or isn’t copyrighted.

Once my own favicon was saved, I used my FTP program to copy and paste it into my theme’s folder. So the path should be:

http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/your_theme/favicon.ico.

Next, I opened up my header.php file in my theme folder and added this bit of code right before the closing </head> tag:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/favicon.ico” />

Now I have a favicon on every page of my blog. One of these days I’ll create something a bit more artistic, but this will work until then.

RT @cassiegermsheid: "How to add a favicon to a Wordpress blog"