You want to see where your favicon is shown? Just follow me, and I’ll show you.

Let me give you two URLs. They happen to be two of my favorite websites, but most likely you’ve never heard of either of them. If you do happen to have visited one of them before, just pick the other one for this demonstration. That’s so you can watch the favicon come up out of nowhere when your browser finds it and puts it where it’s supposed to go. I’ll give you the URLS, but you need to wait! Don’t do anything until I tell you!

URL1: www.stormcarib.com

URL2: www.triddlers.com

1st Place: the Address Bar

OK. It’s time. Open a new tab. If you can’t do that, then just open a new window. Type the URL you picked into the Address Bar. But look at your screen quickly, or you’ll miss the favicon’s first appearance! It’s going to show up just in front of the URL you’re typing in.

2nd Place: the Tab Bar

If you’re using a tabbed browser, then you’ll also see the favicon just to the left of the title of the website. If not, then you won’t be able to observe the favicon’s second location.

3rd Place: Bookmarks or Favorites

If you’ve never been to this URL before, it obviously won’t be in your bookmarks yet. So click on ‘Favorites’, then ‘Add to Favorites’. Now just click ‘Add’. Go back to ‘Favorites’, and you should see your new favorite at the bottom of the list, with its favicon just to the left.

If you recently created your own favicon, but you can’t find it in any of its locations, don’t worry! This is a frequent occurrence. Keep reading:

1) Clear your cache.

2) If this doesn’t reveal your favicon, then you’ll need to close your browser, and then open it again.

3) If that doesn’t work either, then only two possibilities remain: a) Your browser won’t show favicons, which is a very remote possibility, or b) Your favicon is not really a favicon!

OK, it says ‘favicon.ico’. But it still might not be a REAL favicon. You have to create a favicon according to the proper procedure, or it won’t work. The next paragraph has more info about the easiest way to do this.

Here’s where to go to create a favicon that you can use on your own website. Visit my blog at ScriptsForYourWebsite.com for plenty of great easy-to-use plugins and scripts for your own blog. Don’t reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.