Quick Shopping Cart now supports favicons: the cool little images that display in the address bar and browser tabs when you go to a Web site. For example, Google’s favicon is a "G" icon that displays in the address bar. Also, these icons show up when saved to favorites and can show up in Internet Explorer (IE) if you save them to your desktop.

Now that this feature exists, you can create and upload an image that represents your site. Since IE only supports icon ".ico" types, we recommend you create an icon file that's  16x16 in size.

Using an existing icon

If you already have an icon, you can simply upload that image to QSC and publish. If you have a WebSite Tonight site, you may already have a usable icon. Just go to your site's root and append "/favicon.ico" (for example: www.coolexample.com/favicon.ico). If the browser displays an image, right-click that image, and save it to your file system.

Creating a new icon

Follow these suggestions to help ensure success when creating a favicon:

Create with an icon editor.

• You can find many professional and free utilities by simply running a Web search for "Icon Editor" using your favorite search engine. For development and testing purposes, we created test icons using the free image creation utility:  http://www.gimp.org/

Create a clean 16x16 .ico file.

• Favicon images display best when saved as a 16x16 pixel size. Most editors can scale existing images to this size, so you could use an existing image as a starter.
• While we support many file types, an .ico file is the most widely supported (the only type supported by Internet Explorer) and is most easily viewable by your customers.

Use Transparent Background

• The ,ico format allows for transparent background and therefore displays the most cleanly, regardless of the color scheme settings of the browser displaying it.

Publish icon files infrequently.

• Remember, your customers’ browsers cache your old icon and probably never know it has changed. These customers only see the change after their browsers’ cache has been cleared or after the site information has expired. New customers have no problems seeing up the newer icon.