Website Design: Using Fonts On Your Site, Safely by Charly Leetham

No doubt about it, changing the font and font-size on your blog or website can make the world of difference to how it looks and your reader experience / response. One of the challenges that I have encountered when creating sites for clients is that they like to use ‘fancy’ fonts to enhance the look. Unfortunately, these fonts don’t always translate to a ‘web friendly’ website, which can be viewed as it is intended by the site owner.

The reason this happens is that when a webpage loads on a client (visitors) computer, the rendering (or display) of that page is processed by the client computer. This means that the layout commands are interpreted by the client computer and the browser in use at the time. This explains why there are variations between the different browsers, screens and computers.
Which brings us to Websafe fonts – what are they and how do they effect your webdesign?

Simply, a websafe font is a font that is most likely to be present on the visitors computer. When you receive your computer, or reinstall it, there are a set of fonts that are installed as standard on Windows and MAC computers – it is these fonts that are considered to be Web Safe.
By using a Web safe font on your website, you are ensuring that your website will display the way you intended it.

If you choose to use a font that is not considered ‘websafe’, the displaying computer will substitute a font for the display and the results will vary.
But what are the Web Safe Fonts? What should you be using as a standard font on your blog or website? A list of websafe fonts – and how they appear can be found at:

http://askcharlyleetham.com/services/website-design-development/websafe-fonts-your-website

Even though these fonts are known to be websafe, care should should still be taken, as different computers can be customized to remove the ‘default’ fonts.

Charly Leetham is a Online Business Implementation Expert who helps businesses harness the Internet as a sales channel. Charly provides services to solopreneurs and small business who wish to sell or promote their products and services online. For more information on creating an online community, visit http://askcharlyleetham.com/category/services/website-design-development for more information