Font Choice

There are two possible types of font to use are serif fonts, and sans-serif. The difference between these font categories, is that serif fonts have the decorative 'bits' or 'feet' on the ends of letters, a good example of this is the Garamond font, sans-serif fonts don't have these 'feet' - for example Arial and Verdana - below is an example.

As you can see, the serif fonts - garamond and times new roman - have the little feet, under the 'm' for example, whereas the sans fonts are more contemporary, without the feet. You can also get decorative fonts, such as script and grunge fonts, but I'll explain why not to use them later.

These fonts are absolutely great.. in the print industry. If you open any book, you will more than likely encounter a font like times new roman, this is because our eyes find it easier to focus on the serif font, as the next word follows on from the previous by way of the feet.

Now (in terms of web design) we are getting somewhere - if you look around any big sites, you will notice that the vast (vast, vast) majority of them use sans-serif fonts - why is this? Because they are, on a VDU, much easier to read. The common fonts used by most web designers are verdana (which I use throughout my site), arial, tahoma, trebuchet MS and then finally, you're default sans-serif font, which for most people is Microsoft Sans-Serif.

The reason I have decorative fonts under the problems heading, is that apart from using an image, there is not much point in using them, as they will only show up if they are installed on your system - and so obviously they will only show up for you're users if the font is on their system.

There are ways of getting around this problem, the most obvious, and most well-used is to substitute in an image of the text (i.e. to write the text in a graphics program like adobe photoshop, and then save the image and insert it into you're HTML using the <img>> tag) - there are a number of problems with doing this however, primarily that search engines can't read images - so you can have as many headings with you're targeted keywords as you want, if they're images they wont count towards the keyword count for your pages.

Another issue with decorative fonts is that they are sometimes a big turn-off for your visitors, for example if you use a hard to read grunge font then it might irritate you're users that they have to struggle to read it - comic sans also tends to induce rage in anyone experienced in browsing web pages.

You now know that to ensure maximum usability on your site, you should use sans-serif fonts, and if writing for print then to use serif fonts - oh, and never to use comic sans!