Create Short Cuts for Favourite Websites and Add Logos.

Hello all, be nice first one and all.

I don't know if there's another on here for this, but what the heck. I like to be able to get to the pages I enjoy quickly, and I like to do it my way by having something to click on my desktop :)

I do this in a super complicated way probably, I don't know, there most probably is a ten times easier way to do this, but I like the way I do it, it's easy for me and the most convenient way I found to doing it with icons.

I would use the tab menu in chrome, but once you build up a lot of chrome apps and too many pages it gets annoying.

And apologise for the photo ;)

Step 1:

First off; What page do you want to use? To make it easy we'll just go with www.google.com.

You're going to want to make a simple .bat file and save it in a folder in Documents or somewhere that won't be in the way, I have my neatly in my documtents.

The .Bat File: First you need your notepad so go ahead and open it up and all you need to type in is:

start www.google.com

Then save it somewhere nice, when saving make sure you click "View all file types" and that you put "file name".bat (the extension is rather important). Example: "google.bat"
Then hit save.
Running that bat file should open up the google website. But the bat file looks ugly and can't change individual .bat file icons so next step for appearances really.

Step 2:

This step is to make it all look nice, cause I'm fussy like that :)

First of all you're going to need to create a short cut to your .bat file, short cut files are much easier to make look nicer as you can't change icons for .bat or links which would make this easier.

So right click "google.bat" and create short cut, and moves to the desktop or where you want it I guess. Go ahead and get rid of the excess writing, I made mine "Google" much easier.

This bit is up to you; you can either find an icon packs online, or you can create an icon.. Personally I make mine using IcoFX, because I can just chose any image online and make one; so much easier.

If you're making one I say just type Google Logo or Google icon etc into google till you find one that pleases you. I'm going to go ahead and use this little one.

Depending on your software, this bit will varie but IcoFX is pretty simple and free so I'll just go with that. So open up Icofx and open up your image in there. Doing so you should be hit with a "New Image" box. Just go ahead and Ok unless you're using specific sizes. The next window is for cropping etc, hopefully if you're photo is fine you can just go ahead and click ok again.

Simple, now just go ahead and save it as a .ico file (Preferably somewhere you'll remember, I use the same folder for mostly everything with these, just to keep things simple.

Last step then :)

Step 3:

Right, now to change our ugly short cut icon to our new one.

So right click the "Google" short cut file and click properties and on the short cut tab click "Change Icon" (ignore the box that pops up)

You want to hit "browse" and go to the folder you saved you .ico file, and click on that file. Hit ok, but before closing the properties box, you want to slide over to the layout tab (I'll explain why this bit after) you want to change the entries to 1 and the position to about 2000ish.

Reason for this is because it's a .bat file and bat files run a series of commands in prompt so it pops the black box up for about half a second, but enough to catch your eye every time (it becomes annoying) so by doing this it positions the box off screen. No flash (unless you staring at task bar, you still notice it, but not rally

And there you are, a sweet little short cut desktop that takes you exactly where you want it to.
Of course you can do this with other things, but I find this a simple way to get to the pages where I spend more of my time. I would use bookmarks or the chrome tab menu, but it can get filled up too quickly if like me you like visiting pages and saving many bookmarks. Also with apps on there, it's too crowded.

Hopefully this helped, probably all this was way to much for one simple thing, but I like it this way.

Thanks for reading :)