Favicon is like the identity of a website. Also known as website icon, url icon, or page icon.

Using a favicon gets you quite a few advantages:

- Makes an symbolic identity for your website. Having a Favicon for your site will help your visitors identify your website.

- Makes the website visually pleasing.

- Creates branding of your website.

There are many websites online you can use to generate a Favicon.ico file from an image. But I will show you here how you can do it yourself. You can even make it transparent so there is no white background behind.

So here are the steps to make a transparent Favicon.ico file using Photoshop:

- Depending on the version of photpshop you need the plugin icoformat-18f3-win installed so that you can open and save favcicons. Download a copy of the plugin icoformat-18f3-win.zip for windows; mac users may download from here http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/. There is a read me file inside with instructions how to install it.

-  Create a graphics file in Photoshop. Preferably 32px x 32px or 16px x 16px.

-  Put the icon graphics on the file.

- Uncheck the background layer so its not visible.

- Change the color mode to Indexed. It will ask you if you wanna flatten the visible layers; click yes. This will merge all your layers to one.

-  Export it using the photoshop’s built in “save for web”. Save it as .gif or Png.

- Now open the saved file.

- Perform the “Save As” command from “File” menu. Choose the “Windows Icon, ICO” format.

Thats it.

Now you can get the Favicon file show on your website in several ways:

- You can upload the  Favicon.ico file to the root of your website. Browsers will do the rest of the work for you

- Or you can mention the Favicon location in the head section of each file. You can use css code like this <link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>