Personalize Your Website with Web Fonts

Most of you remember when I would say "No - we can't use a fancier font.  There are only 5 websafe fonts available".  A few years ago, that expanded to 10 websafe fonts but we stuck with Verdana or Arial for user friendliness.  All fancy font elements had to added as graphic images which slowed load time and made updating pages a more expensive process.

Recently that restriction has disappeared as the @ font-face declaration has been adopted for all major browsers.  We now can use cascading style sheets and links to font files to embed any web-ready font into a website.  There are still exceptions to the rule and not all fonts will display with equal clarity on a computer monitor.  That aside - design has now opened up to exciting visual opportunities.

If your site is ready for a facelift you may consider doing simple changes to your style sheet to add a little jazz.  Imagine using your logo's font in the page headers. 

Not only will the site look cool

• You are reinforcing your branding efforts. 

• By replacing graphics with Font declarations your page speed improves.

• Your page headers will draw the visitor's eye and will be more likely to get that content read.

   

Considerations - warnings:

• Using decorative fonts for main text will still be hard to read.  We still should stick to sans serif fonts for the main content areas.

• Picking fonts that have no relationship to your product or service can leave the visitor scratching his head about the point of your site.

   

Still, I'm excited about the design opportunities that have been opened up and look forward to implementing this new tool for all our websites.