It's time to boost your brand with an icon
Howard Lake | 12 December 2006 | Blogs
No, not a film or celebrity icon, but something far more useful: a little 16×16 pixels graphic favourites icon or ‘favicon’. Some charities have been using these for a few years now, but there are plenty that have still not embraced them.
Why now? After five years of stagnation, Microsoft has updated its Internet Explorer browser to include the tabbed browsing facility ie. the ability to have multiple web pages open at once, available simply by clicking on the relevant tab. Since Explorer is still the most commonly used browser, this means that lots of people are now waking up to the utility of tabbed browsing.
And browser tabs are another location where favicons can appear. If anything, they are more noticeable there than on the brower’s links bar and in the URL address bar. And they appear elsewhere too – in ‘history’ listings of websites recently visited and in favourites or bookmark lists.
Why are they important? Simply because they help websites stand out from one another, particularly when someone is presented with a range of open tabs, and when searching or scrolling through a long list of website favourites. In addition, they are yet another opportunity for charities and organisations to build their brand.
If you’ve never spotted a favicon before, have a look in the browser tab for this page and in the URL address bar. Spot the red square with a white ‘UK’ in it? That’s UK Fundraising’s favicon. It should appear no matter which page of our site you visit.
Find out how to create a favicon and to install it on your site. It should take no more than five or 10 minutes for your web developer and/or graphics designer to complete, and once uploaded, it will be in use all the time: you won’t need to make any changes.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.