Every Saturday, I read Jane Friedman’s Electric Speed newsletter. One recent newsletter featured a piece on generating a favicon for your website. It explained that favicons are those tiny icons that appear on browser tabs.
Below is the favicon for WOW! Women on Writing. Not only does it appear on your browser tab, you can also find it in your search history and in search results. It makes WOW! and the Muffin easy to find amid all the other tabs, sites, and searches that we writers visit on a regular basis.
As I read the piece in Electric Speed, I was a little envious. I’ve always wanted a favicon although I didn’t know what it was called until that very moment. But did I want it badly enough to take the time to figure it out? The answer was yes and it was helped by the fact that it was wildly easy to do.
I started with Friedman's newsletter and the link she provided to Real Favicon Generator. This site will help you see if your blog or site can support a favicon. It will also help you generate the JPG file of the image.
The Saturday that I was reading this, my site had the WordPress logo. That's fine for WordPress but not so fine for me. There are a lot of WordPress blogs and blending into the pack wasn’t going to do me any good.
But what to use? This is the step that is going to take a bit of time. Yes, you can just choose a piece of clip art, but you don’t want to use something random. You want to use something that will immediately make people think of you. If you write mysteries that are solved by a Sherlock Holmes-style sleuth, you might use a magnifying glass. If you write romance novels, you might use a heart.
Fortunately, I have a logo. It is my nickname set against an oblong background (see below). You might not realize it by looking at the favicons in your browser, but the image is square. My image was rectangular, longer than it is tall. Real Favicon Generator will fix that for you, expanding the image. I fixed it using Photoshop by expanding the canvas size.
I wasn’t altogether certain how to add this to my site once I had it, so I did a quick Google search. That led me to “How to Add a Favicon to Your WordPress Blog.” Honestly, let other people do the heavy lifting by figuring things out whenever you can. If you have a WordPress site, click through. If not? Google is your friend.
In less than 20 minutes, I had sized my image and uploaded my favicon. My site and my blog will now stand out among the WordPress blogs that don’t have a unique image. It isn’t something that you have to do but it is something you might seriously consider. It adds just a bit more professionalism to your site and makes you just a bit easier to find.
It’s small but it can help make you and your work more visible, which isn’t a bad thing in a crowded marketplace.
--SueBE
Sue Bradford Edwards' is the author of over 35 books for young readers. To find out more about her writing, visit her site and blog, One Writer's Journey.
The next session of her new course, Pitching, Querying and Submitting Your Work will begin on November 6, 2022). Coping with rejection is one of the topics she will cover in this course.
Sue is also the instructor for Research: Prepping to Write Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults (next session begins November 6, 2022) and Writing Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults (next session begins November 6, 2022).
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