Stack
Why a whole tool for favicons
Every site needs a favicon, and not just one file: there is the classic .ico, a pile of PNG sizes for different devices, an apple-touch-icon, and a manifest entry. Doing it by hand is fiddly and easy to get subtly wrong, which is why so many sites ship a blurry icon. I wanted to drop in one clean logo and get the complete, correct set out.
Keeping the scope brutally small
The temptation with a tool like this is to keep adding: a logo editor, background removal, an icon library, accounts. I resisted all of it. Favicon Maker does exactly one job, and that constraint is the whole reason it is good.
- One input: your logo. One output: every favicon and icon size, correctly named.
- No accounts, no upsell, no settings nobody understands.
- Because it does one thing, it is easy to trust and impossible to get confused by.
What the favicon trick taught me about SEO
Building this pushed me down a rabbit hole that turned out to matter: the favicon is the little thing that shows up next to your result in search and in browser tabs, and a crisp, recognisable one quietly improves how trustworthy your link looks. A tiny detail most people ignore is exactly the kind of edge that compounds. The tool was small, but the lesson was not: sharp, correct details at every size are part of looking professional, and looking professional is part of getting clicked.
Lessons learned
- A tool that does one thing perfectly beats a sprawling one that does ten things adequately.
- Scope discipline is a feature. Every setting you do not add is one less thing to confuse the user.
- Small visual details, like a crisp favicon, quietly affect trust and click-through. They are worth getting right.
- Generate the complete correct set programmatically. Humans forget sizes; code does not.