subject: Designing A Website Valuable Tips For Choosing The Right Font [print this page] Using the proper font or group of fonts is one of most significant constituents of any successful design and sets the tone for the readers understanding of the content. The reader must be able to go through your design in a way that provides them to understand and learn from it. Making it complicated for the reader to understand your message by poor font selection and usage will obstruct the success of the pages, or the website you worked hard to complete.
The first area where people generally make a mistake when designing their web site is by selecting fancy fonts. Because it might look nice and appealing to you but your visitor on your site might not get it the way want him to see your web page, because it is not necessary that all your visitors would have same font installed in their computers. If system wont find the same font it will end up in mess all over your site, and the whole work you have done your webpage is in trash. So while it's fun to be fancy, stick with the standard fonts that came with your computer and which most of the browsers like IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc., supports, so that everyone can see your site the way it was projected to be viewed.
The next trouble people run into with fonts is color. If you are using a web authoring tool like Dreamweaver or Front Page, the background color of your page is white by default. So, you should make a choice of color which is easy to read on a white background. In this case if you use a white, yellow or light pink color for the fonts they won't be readable at all. So, on a white or light colored background, use only dark color fonts and contrarily on a black or dark colored background use light colored fonts.
The next trouble with fonts is their size. If you use too big size it will cover up most of your page and wont make any sense to be so large size, and if the size of font is too small, then it will not attract your viewer to read it with ease. So, it is better to go with standard size of fonts, for headings, subheadings and body text, which have been tested to bring the greatest results.
The most important thing you ought to do, irrespective of what fonts you pick out, is to ensure you preview your site prior to making it live. Be sincere with your assessment of the look. If you feel it looks bad, then in all probability others will feel it looks bad as well.
There is no rocket science in choosing the right fonts for your web pages, rather it is just common sense. In case you have any doubts, let a few others see it before you go live with your website. It may make the differentiation between a booming site and one that totally sucks.
In general body text should be a minimum of 9 points and a maximum of 14 points. Always keep in mind your audience in deciding about the font size, because, everyone cant read small type comfortably. Thumb rule is that leading should be at least 2 points more than the point size of the font, i.e., 11 point font, 13 point should be leading. Headings, headlines and short phrases or blocks of text are generally 18 points or a little more than that to grab immediate attention of the reader, without stressing too much on their computer screens.
