Fonts

When you build a website or contract to have one built, you decide what fonts (typefaces) you’d like to use.

(Fonts can be in word-graphics, like in a logo, or in navigation bars. Human eyes can see this as text, but it’s really a picture of text, and machines can’t read it, and search engines can’t pick it up, so that ain’t what we’re talking about here.)

The thing to remember when you choose the text font for your website is this: it doesn’t matter how cool the font is that you choose — if the person viewing your site from his or her computer doesn’t have that very same font installed, they’re not going to see it — they’ll see a substitution font.

There are a couple of technical methods for having fancy fonts embedded in a webpage, but they’re often expensive, difficult, or annoying for the client, and they can “break the page” (make it look wonky or unreadable) in many browsers.

What you can do is, in the html-coded font specification for the page, list the cool font you really want folks to see first, and then give a few secondary and tertiary options that also appeal to you. Chances are good that someone will have at least one of them.