I don't know if people notice favicons, but I do, especially given that I use Firefox and heavily uses tabs for browsing. For those who has not yet noticed this Google has started using a more colorful favicon which is a slightly modified version of its elegant blue g favicon that it was using until this change.

A favicon is an integral part of online branding as it gives the website a life while displayed on a tab or on the status bar. Adding a favicon to your site is as easy as inserting the following tag into your html head tag

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

The path should be relative path to your favicon which should be a 16x16 icon properly designed to display correctly at such low resolutions. There are several tools both online and offline that you can use to create and edit icons. http://www.favicon.cc is an online tool which I like and use.

At Zyxware we also use a favicon which is currently a simple Z inside a square. The colors matching the default color combination of the Zyxware Logo. We have not set the logo nor the favicon to be permanent and will change these when we think it is time to change. It is interesting to note that Google started playing with their branding imagery only after they have attained a reasonably big size. So you will have to wait and see what Zyxware does and when it does it :-)