Create shortcut link website desktop

Its not that difficult to provide a custom icon for a shortcut at all. In fact, there are a couple of approaches.

Ill show you both.

But first, a word from the website

Websites have the ability to provide a custom icon in the form of a default icon, which can be used forseveral purposes. The icon, often called favicon.ico, is placed in theroot of the site. For example, Ask Leo!s favicon is at//askleo.com/favicon.ico.

When you bookmark a site, or add it to your Favorites, the favicon istypically used as the icon that appears in the Favorites toolbar or menu hence, the name: favorites icon. [ico isthe file format used for icon images.] Some browsers, like Internet Explorer, display the favicon in the browser address bar when you visit a page on that site.

If a site doesnt provide a favicon, its up to the browser to pick one. Usually, it picks its own icon IEs E icon, Firefoxs fox, and so on.

Pinning a desktop shortcut

When using Internet Explorer in Windows, you can click and hold on thefavicon in the address bar and drag it to the desktop to create a shortcut tothat page.

Visit the page you want the shortcut to go to, click and hold on thesites favicon, drag it to the desktop, and release. Windows will createa shortcut using the favicon supplied by the website or the default browsericon, if the site doesnt provide one.

What Windows creates in this situation is a specialkind of shortcut: a pinned shortcut. And while it is possible tochange the icon by hand-editing certain files buried in your system, apparently Windows doesnt provide a user interface for the process.

In other words, theres no super easy way to change the icon. However,because the icon is that of the site, you may not want or need to change it at this point.

Whats worse about pinned shortcuts is this: if I start Internet Explorer from a pinned shortcut to Ask Leo!, the icon for that run of Internet Explorer becomes the Ask Leo! icon, regardless of the fact that I may browse elsewhere, such as Google.com. The pinned icon is consideredthe icon of the application it starts, not the content initially shown by the application.

Creating a desktop shortcut another way

Another approach to creating a desktop shortcut is to simply right-clickon an empty area on the desktop, click New and then Shortcut.

After that, type or paste in the URL you want the shortcut to go to say //askleo.com click Next and youre done.

Shortcuts made this way are typically given the custom icon of the program thatwould open them. In other words, it would be IEs icon if thats your default browser, orFirefoxs icon if thats your default. On more recent versions of Windows, if the web site provides a favicon, then that may also be used.

If you want something else, then the advantage of this method becomesclear: this shortcuts icon can easily be changed.

Using a customicon

Right-click the shortcut icon that you created, and click Properties.

In the Web Document tab, theres a Change Icon button. Click that. The result is a Change Icon dialog with a number of icons to select from.

Icons are typically stored in .exe or .dll files. In some versions of Windows, the Change Icon dialog will default to display icons contained within your default browser, whichusually contains only the familiar icons for that browser. It appears that Windows 10, at least, will instead display icons from the shell32.dll file contained in Windows itself1. This file contains hundreds oficons to choose from. Just click on the icon you want, and click OK.

Alternately, you can download or create .ico image files, and specifythem using the Browse button.

If you want to display the actual sites icon and it wasnt usedby default, youll need to download it.

Getting a sites custom icon

Using Ask Leo! as an example, enter//askleo.com/favicon.ico in yourbrowser; that should display the favicon image.2

Right-click that image andclick Save picture as. Navigate to the folder whereyou want to save the file, and save it with the name askleo_favicon.ico.

You can then specify it as the icon for the shortcut.

With 300 icons to choose from in shell32.dll, you may not need to do this,but its nice to know you can.