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How to Choose Your Font Style: Web Safe Fonts
Web safe fonts are fonts that are almost universally available on any computer. Browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.) can only display fonts on a web page if they are installed in that computer viewing the web page.
So while you may have a large collection of fonts in your computer, chances are many visitors to your website may only have a limited selection of fonts. If you choose a font from your computer’s library of fonts for your website, it may not be visible to someone viewing your site on a computer that does not contain that font.
This list below displays generally accepted “web safe” fonts – these fonts are included with every new version of Microsoft Windows, and are commonly included on Mac computers also.
There are basically two types of fonts: serif and sans serif. Serif fonts have little hooks (called serifs) on the ends of the font. Sans serif (sans = French for without serifs) are fonts that don’t have any hooks on the feet of the letters:
The most common serif font is Times New Roman and is the default font for most windows-based browsers. Common sans serif fonts used on the internet are Verdana, Geneva, and Tahoma. Monospace fonts have the same amount of space between each letter. You may see a multitude of font styles on websites you view on your computer, however, most of the images you see were built as graphic images and inserted to a webpage. This makes webpages slower to load – and it’s more costly to pay a designer to build your website using graphics. Not only that, search engines read ‘text,” not graphics. So to improve your search engine ranking, it’s important to use text on your webpages.
