{"id":323,"date":"2006-06-13T02:10:20","date_gmt":"2006-06-13T02:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/wp\/?p=323"},"modified":"2013-03-07T18:01:25","modified_gmt":"2013-03-08T02:01:25","slug":"use_a_favicon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/use_a_favicon\/","title":{"rendered":"Use a Favicon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Favicons are those little icons that often appear in the address bar or bookmark list of your web browser when you visit a site. Favicon is short for Favourites Icon (originally implemented by Microsoft and so named after Internet Explorer&#8217;s bookmark feature).<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s up to the web designer to create and include a favicon with his\/her site. Lots of websites don&#8217;t include one and it&#8217;s one minor feature that can go a long way in helping your visitors.<br \/>\n<strong>An example of a typical day in my browser:<\/strong><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"favicon-tabs.png\" src=\"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/images\/journal\/favicon-tabs.png\" width=\"540\" height=\"234\" \/><br \/>\n<em>OK, so I see the Drupal drop, Gmail and Bloglines: keep those open but no need to view them right away); I don&#8217;t know who that star or that DQ icon belong to but they look cool so probably a good design source; The M icon and the speech bubble thingy I recognize and associate with reliable quality; the blank favicons? I&#8217;m pressed for time right now so I may just close them right away.<\/em><br \/>\nOnce you get a few tabs going the page titles disappear leaving only favicons to quickly recall why I loaded the page, who posted, and other assoications I have with a site I know. Notice the ones without icons? I generally don&#8217;t either.<br \/>\nI especially notice this surfing with a tab-enabled browser like Firefox. With more than 10 tabs open it gets pretty cramped. I often load links in background tabs and come back to them when I&#8217;m done reading a site like Boing Boing or my feed reader. With a glance I can check the favicon in the tab and recall what site is open.<br \/>\nAnother example: my <a href=\"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/2006\/05\/web_service_acc.html\">previous post on web services<\/a>. Can you pick out sites in the list more quickly just by icon?<br \/>\nEven though I don&#8217;t have many of my regularly-visited site icons memorized I automatically associate certain feelings or levels of credibility with a favicon that will often determine the level of interest and amount of time I&#8217;m going to spend reading that tab, or sometimes whether I&#8217;ll read the page at all.<br \/>\nNo favicon? The better the chance I won&#8217;t read the page. If I like what I read and see the favicon again, the more likley I&#8217;ll come back.<br \/>\n<span class=\"note\">Tip: I use FireWorks and\/or Photoshop to create my icons, then <a href=\"http:\/\/www.winterdrache.de\/freeware\/png2ico\/\">png2ico<\/a> (for Windows) to compile a favicon .ico file.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Favicons are important because they give a more immediate indication of what website an address or bookmark is associated with. They reinforce a visual identity with a site. Pictures speak faster than words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[74],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1306,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions\/1306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}