So I was thinking about what Michel Fortin was talking about in his report. Specifically the standing out in all the noise the new web has enabled.
More specifically to do with tabbed browsers. (Just a tiny thing I picked up from his report among many!)
IE has tabs. Firefox has tabs.
No more windows solely dedicated to your page. Your visitor can have every single competing site up in the same window vying for their attention right next to yours.
I am fighting back.
I never knew how to put a tiny icon on my tab and in the browser address bar. Thought it was very complicated and always put off finding out how it’s done.
See mine up there?
Draws the eye away from all the other tabs you have open right now doesn’t it? (Unless their little icons are cooler than mine which right now is very likely.)
The point is, most sites never do this and all the tabs and address bars look boring, bland, and unimportant at a very crucial moment in time: the time you are closing tabs and windows to clean up your space and start over or shut down for the day!
I noticed something about how I surf. I do open new browsers even though tabbed browsing should have eliminated this problem. Like right now I have 6 browser windows open. Some with more than one tab and others just one site.
This happens, surely, to everyone after a lengthy surf.
How do I decide what to keep open when I clean up to start fresh?
The things that re-capture my attention!
I found myself noticing pages I was about to close because they had icons that drastically stuck out at that crucial moment.
I found myself keeping a couple tabs open to read for later solely because of this.
Hmmm…. I needed an icon for this site!
(Here’s one I did for the Rewilding Institute.)
Here’s How I Did It
All you need is a 16×16 pixel .gif image. Forget the tutorials that say you need it to be in icon (.ICO) format. IE and Firefox use .gif just fine, so you don’t need to blow money on icon software.
There are a million free programs that make images. Grab one or open what you have and create a 16×16 pixel image out of your logo or something easy to see and read in tiny format.
Lazy? Here are a gazillian free icons.
Name it “whateveryouwant.gif.”
Upload it to your server. In your root images folder is fine.
Then open your blog theme (in WordPress its header.php) and pop the code below just above the closing /head tag:
V-freakin-oila!
You got yourself your own icon for the browser address bar and tabs.
Everything you can possibly do to stand out means more now than ever before.
Read Michel’s report and watch what me and other bloggers are talking about when it comes to the noise level of the internet for surfers and you will see that every little thing helps.
Literally!
En-freakin-joy!