Use a Favicon

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’s bookmark feature).
It’s up to the web designer to create and include a favicon with his/her site. Lots of websites don’t include one and it’s one minor feature that can go a long way in helping your visitors.
An example of a typical day in my browser:

OK, so I see the Drupal drop, Gmail and Bloglines: keep those open but no need to view them right away); I don’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’m pressed for time right now so I may just close them right away.
Once 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’t either.
I 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’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.
Another example: my previous post on web services. Can you pick out sites in the list more quickly just by icon?
Even though I don’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’m going to spend reading that tab, or sometimes whether I’ll read the page at all.
No favicon? The better the chance I won’t read the page. If I like what I read and see the favicon again, the more likley I’ll come back.
Tip: I use FireWorks and/or Photoshop to create my icons, then png2ico (for Windows) to compile a favicon .ico file.