You know, I may just be eternally in love with Pawan Agrawal, the guy who runs MaxBlogPress. The guy is constantly coming out with new, amazingly cool/useful WordPress plugins. The other day I raved about his newly-launched Psychic Search plugin; you can see my ravings about it in this blog post.
Anyhow, he recently created a new plugin that’s targeted specifically towards those of us who don’t have the know-how to make our own themes & aren’t particularly well-versed in much more than just tweaking pre-coded layouts. You can actually see it in action on this site already; notice the little star icon by my url/title? That’s courtesy of installing the new MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin.
Not only does having a “favicon” brand your results in web searches (if the surfer is using a certain Firefox extension like Google Icon) and thusly draw more notice to it; it also helps attract your bookmarker’s attention. If you’re like me and have a huge, long list of bookmarks, anything with a unique (or any at all, really) icon tends to get checked more frequently than the others, solely because it immediately grabs my attention more than the plain, icon-less sites surrounding it in the bookmark menu. Maybe once more people have caught on to favicons, this will change, but it still seems like most websites neglect that aspect of their site’s design. Favicons can also show up & be effective on your RSS feeds, tabbed browsing, and even some blogs’ comment sections. So, yeah - it’s just generally an all-around good idea, especially at this point where it’s not everyone uses them, to have your sites sporting their own favicons.
The MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin allows you to pick from a batch of pre-loaded icons, or upload your own - and all you have to do is activate the plugin in your WordPress dashboard; no code insertions or anything. Definitely another hit from MaxBlogPress.
February 28th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I am sure I will be using that! I have always wanted to put up a favicon but was too lazy to figure out how to do it.