Fonts
Picking a font or typeface is an important part of typography and as far web design goes, there's never been more opportunity to pick exactly the right fonts for your web site.
Using fonts online is still a complicated business though and there are many things to bear in mind before you set your heart on using a particular set of fonts for your web site.
Web Safe Fonts
"Web Safe" is the name we give to the fonts you can pretty much guarantee will be available on your visitors computers. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of these and not every body likes them. However they present a good foundation for your copy and some of them a very legible for reading on the screen.
Font Stacks
A font stack is a way of specify a range of fonts that be used to present your text. Your visitors web site will display the text in any of the fonts listed in the stack (as long as it's installed on the computer). These create a good deal of flexibility and open up many more options to you.
Many people have Microsoft Office installed on their computers and Office includes a wide range of additional font's. A font stack lets you pick a Microsoft Office font as the first choice - any visitors with Office installed will see your copy in that font. Other visitors will see text in a highly legible (if not slightly plain) web safe font.
Text in Images
One way people get around problems with web safe fonts and font stacks is to type the text in a graphics program like Photoshop. The "text" is no longer text but an image that they upload to their web site. This is bad because it makes it difficult to update and causes all sorts of problems for search engine optimisation, accessibility and printing.
Our CMS has an advanced system for converting text to images with out these problems, but it is only suitable for very specific situations (and of course requires that your visitor has images enabled).
Flash
With clever use of flash we can present your copy in virtually any font and still keep it search engine friendly, accessible and editable. This requires that your visitors have a recent version of flash installed for their browser. This technology needs to be used selectively though because it takes time to load in your visitors browsers and render the text.
Embedding Fonts
Emerging technologies now allow font files to be embedded in your web pages. Your visitors browser can automatically download them and use them to display your copy. Embedding fonts provides the greatest control and flexibility but it does come a cost.
The font foundries who toil away creating wonderful fonts want to be paid for all of their hard work. You may think that you already own a font you have installed on your computer but this is not necessarily the case. Once you begin using that font on a web server or embedding it in a web page, the chances are that the font's designer will want to charge you for the privilege.
There are a number of very high quality free fonts available, but sadly no where near the number of commercial fonts.
If you have decided that you simply must have as many people as possible see your site with your chosen font we will be very please to assist, so long as you can provide use with the fully licensed and paid for font-files.
