Website Design: Using Fonts on Your Site Safely

Without a doubt, changing the font and font size on your blog can make a big difference in how it looks and your reader’s experience / response. One of the challenges I’ve run into when building client sites is that they like to use “fancy” fonts to enhance the look. Unfortunately, these fonts do not always translate to a “web-friendly” website, which can be viewed as intended by the site owner.

The reason this happens is that when a web page is loaded onto a client computer (visitors), the client computer processes the rendering (or display) of that page. This means that the layout commands are interpreted by the client computer and the browser in use at the time. This explains why there are variations between different browsers, screens, and computers.

Which brings us to Websafe fonts: what are they and how do they affect your web design?

Quite simply, a web-safe font is a font that is more likely to be present on a visitor’s computer. When you receive your computer, or reinstall it, there is a set of fonts that are installed as standard on Windows and MAC computers; it is these sources that are considered Web Safe.

By using a web-safe font on your website, you ensure that your website is displayed the way you want it to.

If you choose to use a font that is not considered “web-safe,” the computer displaying the screen will substitute one for the font and results will vary.

Although these fonts are known to be safe for the web, care must be taken as different computers can be customized to remove the “default” fonts.