Fonts on the Web
The fonts you use for your web site are an important decision, as they will often reflect your site’s tone and affect its visual impact This is a list of the common fonts that we can use on web sites:
- Arial, Helvetica
- Arial Black
- Bookman Old Style
- Comic Sans
- Courier
- Courier New
- Garamond
- Georgia
- Impact
- Lucida Console
- Lucida Grande
- MS Sans Serif
- Palatino Linotype
- Symbol
- Tahoma
- Times New Roman
- Trebuchet
- Helvetica
- Verdana
- Webdings
- Wingdings
You might be wondering why you should restrict yourself to this small list when you have so many more beautiful fonts on your computer. When writing for the Web, it does not matter how it looks on your computer, because the fonts you use are only visible to people who have those identical fonts on their computers.
So if you use some exotic font, a user who does not have those fonts installed on their computer will see something all together different – sometimes drastically so!
Here is an example of a web site that was using an uncommon font. The person viewing the website could only see a set of strange symbols because they did not have the same font on their computer.
The only fail-safe way to make sure a particular non-standard font shows up the same on all computers is to put the text using that font in a picture, and include that image in your web page.However, this is really only useful for decorative purposes, such as for design elements on your web page, or for small snippets of text that you don’t really need to be found by the search engines.
There is another way to use some decorative fonts on your web site…click here to learn how!
