Web Design - The Best Fonts For Websites

What are the best fonts to use if you are building a new site? Are fancy, curly, eye catching fonts the finest, or the plain and boring standard fonts?

Frequently when I am creating a site after the customer has looked at several revisions, the topic of conversation drifts to the fonts that should be used on the web site. This is the time that the fun really starts to begin! As a rule the customer has been browsing about Word on their computer and playing with some fonts there. So the question is put, “Might we have specially curly school boy graffiti font for all of the headings and…”.

Stop right there! Go no further. The difficulty is that whilst this font might look stunning on your web site, what will it look like when your buyers visit your site? And here is the trouble and it is preceded with a technical explanation.

When you open a web site the style sheets dictate what fonts, or font families, could be used within the various areas of the webpage that you are opening. But all that this code does is to refer the browser to the selection of font that you already have installed on your computer. So if you have installed specially curly school boy graffiti on your computer then you will be able to see that font when you open the page. But, if this ultra fancy font is not installed on your computer, then the default will be used.

So to be safe, when arranging what fonts to use on the various elements of the page it is safest to stick to just those fonts that are installed on the majority of machines and will appear roughly the same. Here we are looking at not merely the different versions of Windows machines, but also Macs.

This means that the selection of fonts that are compatible with the majority of users is very limited. There are loads of web-sites that collection most of them and allow you to see what they will appear as, but the choice is very limited.

Which is why we then get to a list of standard fonts that we see in use on web-sites time and time again. Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Garamond and so on.

Sadly, this selection does mean that the fonts we get to play with are not that exciting, but if you want to be displaying the page as text, then that is the rule that we have to abide by. But, there are alternatives. As for instance, if you are designing banners, logos and other elements of the page then these could be created as images on your computer and this gives you the freedom to experience any font that you might find on the internet. The downside - well images are not accessible to search engines and accessible readers, so the content of the page cannot really depend on such techniques.

You might use graphics for headers and supply an alt attribute for search engines and those unable to read the graphics if you are desperate to use a fancy font. But, aside from this cheat, the finest fonts to use when you are creating a website are those boring and frequently used fonts listed above.

Article Source: http://www.gamblingarticlessite.net

Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a website design Liverpool service. For more useful tips, call into the internet marketing blog.

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