Favicon's in a SharePoint Master Page

My buddy John Ross had asked me if I knew anything about adding Favicons to SharePoint branding, so this post is for him. He pointed me to this post on MindSharp Blogs. This method didn’t work for him when he tried it so was wondering how I did one for a project we worked on. I think the method in that post technically should work as IIS will pickup favicons that are in your IIS root, but I think SharePoint may be blocking access in some instances. For me, in traditional html, I have always preferred to call out favicons specifically with a tag in the html

this way I ensure that my code, not the server, is handling the file. So now, how do you do this in SharePoint? Here are my steps

Drag a favicon.ico file to the Images directory of your MOSS site with SharePoint designer.

Add the following line to your Master Page at the bottom of the head section right before the tag:

Check-in, publish, and approve your Master Page so that anonymous folks can see the change.

Refresh the site, and you should see the favicon.

If you have problems seeing the icon, IE could be caching it, try Firefox and it should show eventually in IE.

More info on Favicons

Info on clearing IE’s Favicon cache