Best Practices in Using Web Fonts

If you haven’t yet figured out that fonts used online are very different from those used in print then you have to start your designer training yet again. This is a fundamental tenet for designing for web. Print media and newspapers can afford t use expansive and fancy fonts as long as they get read. After all, nobody throws away their newspaper if they don’t like the font. With websites things are different. Firstly, it’s slightly harder on the eyes to read on screen. Secondly that dreaded red cross button is so handy dangling there at the top right hand corner of the screen. Sooner than they are stuck on your font fanciness they rush to close your website. The attention span online is very little. 

Using a wrong font on web pages has a drastic effect. It can leave your web page    unavailable to a lot of people who might not have that exact font installed in their machines. Also, even if you use one of those ‘web safe fonts’ you have to keep a number of things in mind. You can’t just use any font with any type of site. Relevance and appropriateness is the key. So in order to decide upon the best fonts to use for your site we’ll go through a simple list.

   Identify What Your Website Wants

Okay, this may be the most crucial task you’d undertake to decide upon a font. If you haven’t already assessed your website’s nature then this is the time to do it. If you were writing a sales site, which has prominent headings and sub-headings you’d need a different kind of font. If you were doing a simple informative site on flowers you’d need a more delicate font. Also, a Christian site. So, it’s all about relevance and appropriateness.

Search Engine Optimisation

A lot of guys find a neat little way to use their favorite but exotic font. Knowing that their fonts are rarely used on user’s machines they embed the text in images. Basically, they use images and write on them using these fonts. So a user can read these beautiful fonts. But there is a huge issue with that- Search engines can’t read images and any content on images. You can use ‘alt’ tag in images to caption it but that’s it. So, leave this neat little trick and stick to web safe fonts. Best web fonts are the Sans Serif fonts, such as, Verdana and Tahoma.

Use CSS To Specify Fonts

Cascading style sheets are a boon to designers. They make your work so lighter and efficient. Using font is all the easier with CSS. You can use a consistent font type and size across your site using CSS. One great feature that helps you specify web fonts for your site is that you can write a comma separated list of fonts, i.e. (Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tahoma) in your stylesheet. This basically tells the browser to choose the font amongst the lists that is installed on user’s machine. Neat, isn’t it!

Victor Solovey has been designing blogs every since he can remember. He loves customizing blogs and designing new themes. He has already designed over 100 Wordpress themes. Victor can be contacted to do psd to html conversions quickly.