For a layman, font in website designing may seem a small element but that doesnt mean it is. Fonts are actually very important and if not chosen wisely, they can drive the traffic away. It needs to be in harmony with all the other visual elements to determine the overall feel of the website.
Seasoned designers regard it as an important factor in narration of the website story. While there are innumerable elements to be paid heed to, below mentioned are the ones whose knowledge is quite obligatory.
Type of Fonts
The five basic types of fonts are serif, sans serif, cursive, fancy and monospace. The duo that has popular usage is serif and sans serif. The very first decision that a web designer has to take is to choose between the two according to the appropriateness for the website. For better understanding, lets delve on the two before moving ahead.
Serif- These are the family of fonts that have tails or feet (as they are famously known) at the end of letters and symbols. Their usage is old and could easily be found in books, magazines and even newspapers. These have more of an artistic appeal.
Sans serif- Like its aforementioned sibling, these fonts dont have tails or feet to flaunt. There are simpler, popular at present and have a more technical appeal. In case of website and technical content too, these are preferred over Serif.
Common Fonts
Your website is going to be viewed through different platforms and thus it is important to choose fonts that are preinstalled in different operating systems. For instance in case of PCs, Arial has a better presentation among others while for Macs, Helvetica is the one that is well accepted. New fonts like Verdana have a good appearance on both machines, and are widely popular nowadays.
Hence, one needs to make sure that whatever he chooses from the two types, it has to be supported by major operating systems. In case the same is not the case, the browser will go on to select what the default font would be and this is surely not good news for your websites appearance, ask your trusted best website design company to make the picture more clearer.
Text Size and Style
Text size has to be chosen very wisely because too large would take a lot of space while too small will be hard to read. Text size could be different for the sake of emphasizing on main body text, headings and subheadings. Do remember that height and width of a character varies with the type of font. So, trust your judgment while selecting.
For style, attributes like plain, bold, italic, underline, capitals and color are used for emphasis, highlighting and various other reasons. However, one shouldnt be too liberal in their use as it only makes the content amateurish.
