Have you ever noticed that when you visit some sites (including this one!) you see a little icon next to the web address? You also see this icon if you save the address to your desktop or favorites.

Guess what - you can do that too!

The first thing you need is an image usually 16 pixels by 16 pixels that you want to become the shortcut icon. You can create one from an image you already have with any number of applications out there. There are even some online (free) services, such as http://www.graphicsguru.com/favicon.php.

Once you have this icon, you must name it "favicon.ico" and put it on your server, and note the URL of where it resides (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/images/favicon.ico). Generally, this will be your web address, then a "/", and then the file name. You'll have more folder names and "/"s if it's in a folder somewhere, like the images folder in the example URL.

Then you must add this line of code to your homepage, between the head tags*:

LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.yourdomain.org/favicon.ico"
(to make the text show up, I removed the < > so put the whole line between those two symbols, and obviously change the URL to the URL of your image)

* If you're using Frontpage, Dreamweaver, etc. there should be a way to view the HTML code (if you don't edit your own site and you use Lutherans Online or something like that, you probably cannot do this). When viewing the HTML code, look for the two "tags" toward the top that read head and /head (each within a pair of < >). The above code needs to be between those somewhere, but not inside of another pair of tags (a pair is like the head tags sample with the two brackets and the end one has the "/").

And that's it!

Thanks to Len Mason of ELCA Communication Services for posting that on LutherLink once upon a time!