I Am Blogging

Perhaps most of you know that favicon doesn’t help directly in SEO. And that’s very true. But that doesn’t mean that you should neglect this tiny part of your site design.

Most of the sites now a days have their own favicons. And if you don’t have it, it looks like you are not updating your site to the latest technology. Favicon gives your site a more professional look & better way of branding. Whenever someone bookmarks your site, he or she can find it out easily from the crowd. In tabbed browsing it helps user to identify which tab has which site. A custom favicon means a better chance of getting noticed.

There is another reason for using favicon. If you don’t use custom favicon you will get 404 errors in your server log every time one bookmarks your site using IE or everytime someone opens your site using browsers like Firefox or Opera. This is because the browser first requests the server for the custom favicon. If the favicon is not present in the server the browser uses its default icon. And a faviocn.ico 404 Not Found error is created in the log. But there will be no error for your user. He will see your site as it is without any problem. Still if you monitor your error log regularly, remember a favicon of your own can clear lots of the errors.

When you try a new design you check your site on your favourite browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera. But what about other numerous browsers across differnt OSes? No doubt, the users of these browsers are small in number. But it is your duty as a webmaster to reach as many users as possible & give them statisfaction while browsing. Would you like to see how your site looks in different browsers of Windows, Linux, Mac OS or BSD? Don’t get afraid. I am not going to tell you to download & install all these broswer on your OS. Try BrowserShots instead. It will test your site on its server & upload the screenshots of your site on different browsers. You can see them easily by clicking the images. You can choose to check from about hundred of different browsers with very little effort.

Here is a quick tip to make your pages load faster. Just remeber that .PNG format loads faster than any other image format like .JPG or .BMP. So before you upload any image to your website or blog just convert it to .PNG if it is not already. This will help you to reduce the page loading time.