But first, why would someone want to create a shortcut to a website on their desktop? To open that site in the web browser of course. It does not really matter if it is a link to Facebook, eBay or your favorite tech news site. You can basically create a shortcut to any website on the Internet.

The easiest way to create a shortcut to a web page is the following: Open the website in the web browser of choice, locate the favicon in the address bar and drag and drop that icon to the computer desktop.

Once you let go of the icon on the desktop, you will see that a shortcut has been created. A click on the icon opens the website in the default web browser. That’s actually only true if Firefox, Chrome or Opera have been used to drag and drop the icon to the desktop to create the shortcut. Users who do that in Internet Explorer will notice that the shortcuts will always open Microsoft’s web browser regardless whether it is the default system browser or not.

That’s where the handy portable software HTMtied may be used. The program basically allows a user to convert any Internet address or multiple addresses into small web shortcuts. These always open in the default browser on double-click but can also be dragged and dropped into a browser to be loaded.

It is probably easier to create the website shortcuts directly in another web browser that saves them in the universal format though.

It is still possible to create shortcuts by dragging and dropping the favicon to an empty space on the computer desktop or one of the folders on the computer. A more versatile option is the Deskcut add-on for the Firefox web browser which adds a right-click option to the browser that allows a user to create a shortcut on the computer that points to the selected website.

Deskcut comes exactly with the set of features that one would expect from an add-on like this. It adds the option to create a website shortcut to the right-click menu which will create a shortcut of the website in the active tab. The user can either manually select the name and location that shortcut should be saved in or edit the options once to set a permanent location and name for the shortcuts.

The add-on can generate the filename of the shortcut from the page title, page url or prompt the user to enter a name. It is furthermore possible to add data or time to the filename and strip, encode or replace invalid characters from the shortcut name. A path can be set once so that all shortcuts are automatically saved in that location.

The main advantage of using the Deskcut add-on over the manual drag and drop solution is that the add-on works in fullscreen mode as well. It is more comfortable to create the shortcut from the right-click menu than to resize the Firefox window to be able to drag and drop the favicon to the computer desktop. It would even be more complicate if the shortcut should be saved in another folder on the computer’s hard drive.