All the time when working on websites, I have requests from clients who have a certain font they want for their website. All the time I have to respond why we can’t use that font. I wanted to expound on that a bit here.
What is a web safe font? A web safe font is a font that is commonly available on all computers.
Why does that matter? If you choose a font that is not common to all computers, then your site will not render the same on all computers. Say I choose “Curlz” as the font for my website, if the user looking at my website doesn’t have Curlz, then they will see a generic font. So the work to get the Curlz font is in vain.
If you choose a standard font such as Verdana, then you can rest assured that all computers are going to see that font in the same way.
Also, you want to make sure your text is easy to read by everyone and nothing makes someone jump from your site faster than illegible text. (Aside from music that starts automatically.)
Why can’t I just make all the text into a JPG? Well, you can. But I strongly advise against it for a number of reasons. Number one, you can’t optimize for search engines with images. Google will not read the text that you put in that JPG. So you by putting all the text into images, your site is virtually without content for the search engines to find. Another reason is that you will make your site unusable for the visually impaired, who use screen readers to read the text on the page. If your text is in an image, the screen reader can’t see it.
Which fonts are safe? Here is a link to the commonly acceptable fonts for the web.
I hope this clears the way for lots of good, readable text on the web out there!
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