Displaying the Bird

One of my volunteer jobs is to maintain the web site for the Treasure Island Country Club, the homeowner’s association for the island where I own a vacation place. The web site looks dated and could use a professional redesign. It was created in 2002, back when 17-inch monitors were still a luxury, well before social media and Web 2.0. I use an older version of Microsoft FrontPage to keep it updated. Today I added a new feature so at least the URL looks cutting edge when you view it in the address bar or in a favorites list. Instead of the default Internet Explorer symbol, there’s now a custom icon displaying the official Treasure Island seagull.

Microsoft calls these icons “shortcut icons” and has been supporting them since I.E. 5.0. But their popularity has taken off in the last year or so. It’s surprisingly simple to add one. All you need to do is to save an icon to your web site’s root directory with the default file name favicon.ico. (The browser does the rest.) The icon needs to be square in size, at least 16 x 16 pixels, and in icon format. Since I don’t have an icon editor, I created a square bitmap in Microsoft Paint of the Treasure Island seagull on a dark blue background. I uploaded the bitmap to one of the free icon-generator web sites, followed the steps there, and saved it as a 32 x 32-pixel icon. That’s all there is to it.