What font to choose for a web site

Before choosing what type of look in font you want for a web site, let me explain how fonts work.

Fonts are seen on a web site by what fonts are available on your  (Windows and MAC) PC to view .

There are a group of all familiar fonts available on computers that all people can view. These are:

Arial

Arial Black

Comic Sans MS

Courier New

Georgia

Impact

Lucida Console

MS Sans Serif

Palatino Linotype

Tahoma

Times New Roman

Trebuchet MS

Verdana

Webdings, Webdings (Webdings², Webdings²)

Wingdings , Zapf Dingbats (Wingdings², Zapf Dingbats²)

When deciding which font to use, it is BEST to use one of the above for your content on your site so that you can view how all others are viewing on your site.

Want to use a fancy font?

There are endless amount of font types and styles to use on a site but only use these in a graphic form. Remember search engines will not view these in graphic form but something for a title or header would be ok to use (one of the basics is even better) however do NOT keep fancy fonts for word content. Others will not see the fancy font in your content if they do not have this font available on their PC.

What happens when you use a fancy font for content?

Remember viewers can only see with what fonts are available on their local PC. So wording set in a fancy font that you can see and they can’t, will be reverted to a font that they have available. So you never know how they are going to view your site and read your content if you use a fancy font for content.

If a fancy font is used in a logo – this is fine, just as long as the graphic has the necessary components for search engines to recognize what that graphic is saying.

There are options out there with Java that you can use fancy fonts on your site…but #1 you will pay the price to have one of these installed for your site and #2 Im not sure how or even if these are read by search engines since technically this is an “effect” that is on a site.

So choose fonts very carefully – keep content clean and legitable for all viwers on a site. Choose one of the above as a choice for your font and keep the fancy fonts limited to graphics if needed.

I hope this helps on thinking about the way you would like your site to look.

Lyn Coggins (43 Posts)

Lyn Coggins is owner of cWebArt, Graphic and web designer since 2001. She is located in Hendersonville NC near Asheville. Offering web site design, graphic art, training, business consulting and tutorials for web site businesses and WordPress users.