Okay, I just emailed Richards1052 with this, but it will probably come in handy for someone else. No flames, please! This is what you need to do:
1. Create your 16 x 16 favicon and name it favicon (the extension MUST be .ico).
2. Save it to your public_html (aka “root�) directory.
3. In that same directory you’ll find a file named “ .htaccess�. You must edit that by adding the following NEW line underneath everything else that’s in it:
AddType image/x-icon .ico
4. Save that file without changing anything else, then go to where your theme is kept: (mine’s in public_html/wp-content/themes/[whatever my theme is called] but yours maybe in a deeper folder, depending on how you’re setup)
5. Once there, open the file that has all your meta information at the top (the title, character set used, etc). Mine’s in a file named header.php but yours may not necessarily be … just look for the info in the HEAD section and that’s a good place to try.
6. Edit that file to include (ie; add) the following line (making sure that it’s INSIDE the HEAD section, and that you replace my URI with yours):
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.andrewcairns.com/public_html/favicon.ico" type="image/ico" />
7. That’s the end of the website end of things. Now head to FireFox and select the Tools/options/cache area. Clear the cache (this may take a while) then restart FireFox.
8. Click on your bookmark for your site and you should see the new favicon in both the navigation bar and the bookmark. You may need to click on it a second time. Open a new tab in your browser and click on your bookmark again – this time you should see your favicon in there, too!
I just practised all this on my site and it’s working fine, now. The reason you have to add the extra bit into your .htaccess file is because Apache (running on many servers) doesn’t recognise .ico the way some other server software does. WordPress typically runs on servers with Apache running. You’ll never need to clear the cache, etc again: if you ever want to change your favicon just upload it so as to replace the current one and refresh your site … it should be visible in the nav bar, bookmark and tab (I just checked … it does work!).
Hope this has been a bit of a help for you. If you need anything else you know ehere to find me. :o)