Favicons for Commerce Sites

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Favicons for Commerce Sites

jsinger

7:03 pm on Oct 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

Does your commerce site use a favicon to make your bookmarks stand out? Do the major commerce sites use them?

Thoughts? Any negatives?

lexipixel

7:03 pm on Oct 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

Does your commerce site use a favicon to make your bookmarks stand out?

Yes. Whenever I design an ecommerce site, one of the first things I do is shrink their logo down, or design something that represents their site / logo / brand as a 16x16 image and covert it to .ICO format.

Do the major commerce sites use them?

Some do, some don't. (eBay, Dell, YankeeCandle, etc. have 'em -- it seems like the "stodgier" brands don't: Sears, Ford, etc..).

Thoughts?

I think anything you can do to reinforce branding is a good idea.

Any negatives?

Not that I see.

Morgenhund

1:58 pm on Oct 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

Additionally, having a favicon.ico elimiates dummy HTTP error messages in your server logs :-)

pbradish

4:33 pm on Oct 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

Yes! I always use a Favicon for every single ecommerce site that I do.

My thought on this is that there's really reason to not use a Favicon at this stage in the game. They are very easy to create and help separate your website from others in your niche.

Quadrille

5:22 pm on Oct 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

From a user POV, they help the site to stand out on bookmarks, and there's no down side.

I wish every site had one!

rocknbil

7:55 pm on Oct 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

Plus it helps prevent your error logs from getting crammed up with file does not exist errors, because IE always looks for it whether it's in your page code or not.

jsinger

6:09 am on Oct 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Okay, I now have a nifty looking favicon uploaded today. It shows up beautifully in IE 6.0, but not in IE 7 or Firefox.

Flushed out the cache. Closed the browser and reopened it. Used a couple of other WebmasterWorld tips and it doesn't appear. Ideas?

I'm using the same <head> code used by WebmasterWorld.

pbradish

2:07 pm on Oct 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Is your store in the root directory? If not, it could be a path issue.

sniffer

2:52 pm on Oct 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

also, when a user has a few tabs open the favicon 'brands' your tab window. I think this is quite important...

Morgenhund

3:16 pm on Oct 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

jsinger: struggled once with same issue...

Couldn't make it appear, then later suddently It appeared itself somehow...

Try to add site to the favorites -- it worked once for me :-)

jsinger

3:31 pm on Oct 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

Favicon finally showed up in Firefox. Still nothing in IE 7.

I think the problem may be that I have to remove all old bookmarks to my own site. Hate to do that since a few point to hard-to-find places in the back office.

lexipixel

7:38 pm on Oct 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

I see the same thing: FAVICONS not showing up, bookmarking the page --- .ICO still not there -- then suddenly appearing.

It seems like a cache problem. Maybe the browser pulls the .ICO file from the cache folder if it's there, but stores it elsewhere once it is associated with a book mark.

Hard to find the files since the browser has to rename and store them in a way that associates it with a particular URL, (since every site's icon is named FAVICON.ICO)...

A page on an IBM Tivoli setup pages says:

- Internet Explorer requests favicon.ico only when the returned page is bookmarked.
- Firefox requests favicon.ico at the same time as the request for the page.