In actual fact, this is not as difficult a question as it first appears. Although you might have hundreds of fonts installed when you look on your machine, most of them have to be ignored.
Why you can’t use just any font
Here we are not talking about the graphical elements of your website but the text. The actual content of your website that the search engines and visitors will use.
Whereas you can build and test your website with any font that you see on the list of fonts installed, what fonts you have installed will be personal to your machine. When you buy it, depending on the software installed you will be given a set of basic fonts and some fancier fonts and then you can install more if you want.
But the problem is if you try to use these self installed, or even just some of the non-standard fancier, fonts. You see when you open a webpage the details for the fonts that are used are taken from the fonts you have installed. If the webpage requires that a particular Gothic font is used to display that wording and you have it installed, then great, it works fine. However, if you have not got it installed on your machine then your computer does not know how to render that font and will end up giving you something different.
The standard fonts
So when displaying text on websites we have to look at a list of fonts that are standard across most machines. PCs and Macs. Windows XP to 7 and all of the other variations you can think of. And these fonts must render pretty much the same.
Typical fonts that are ‘safe’ to use include:
• Sans-Serif – Arial, Arial Black, Impact, Lucida Sans Unicode, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, Verdana and MS Sans Serif.
• Serif – Georgia, Palatino Linotype and Times New Roman.
• Others – Comic Sans MS, Courier New and Lucida Console.
That’s not a totally exhaustive list and as older systems die out the list is probably getting bigger, but it gives you a good idea of what is available.
Which to choose
So, which are you going to use? Well the Serif type fonts typically look formal and can work well for sites such as solicitors. Sans-serif are less formal and it is probably from that list that most websites make their choices. And some people just hate fonts such as Comic Sans.
A small choice is a good thing
Overall, you probably only need one or two fonts for your website. A main font and maybe a second font if you want to define a block of text as being different, for example quotes from customer testimonials placed on the side navigation. Probably one of the worst things you could do would be to see how many you can use on each page! Consistency is the vital key.
