Neat little trick! I just used a free trial of a program that builds custom icons of all sorts. It is a 21 day freebie, so you'll have plenty of time to build all you want or buy it if you're a developer. I haven't seen many of these custom icons. I know aol does it for their free trial icons, etc. It really stands out in my Favorites dropdown. Sure to bring folks back when they see it! Try mine. I did it in about 15 minutes. I had one person who couldn't see it in her browser. Please reply and let me know if it works for you. Haven't tried netscape or open source browsers, just IE6. She claims to have it, too, but only gets the standard blue e icon when she sets brushwood in favorites. Not sure what's up but I'd really like to know if you get my icon when you save the site to favorites. If this isn't reliable, I'd like readers here to know.
http://www.brushwoodnursery.com
the program is found here:
http://www.microangelo.us/
After download, open up Studio and set the new image to 16 color and 16 by 16 pixels. Build the icon with the tools shown. It's really pretty easy. After you build an icon, save as file type: Icon Resource and name it "favicon"
then load it (favicon.ico) to your public directory. The browser is supposed to seek this file and, if not found, will default to the blue e or whichever is their default web page icon. My IE6 picked it right up and even shows the icon for all my site's pages in the address bar dropdown.
Please let me know what you think.