Website Design – Choosing the Right Font

Website design consists of many attributes, such as image and colour choices. But when designing a website some web designers leave the font choice to last. This might be because the choice of web safe fonts is limited. But this should give you even more of a reason to carefully consider what font to use for your website. The choice of font can dramatically alter the look and feel your website.

Let's take a look at the most common web fonts.

Times New Roman and Times – Two very, very similar fonts. Most website users will hardly be able to tell the difference. They will give a site a more traditional or classical feel. Would suit a website selling antiques, historical sites or financial sites such as a bank's website. Times and Times New Roman are serif fonts.

Georgia – This font has been designed to be viewed on screen, which means it is easier to read on screen than Times or Times New Roman. It is a good alternative to these fonts as it is still a serif font so will help to create a similar feel.

Helvetica and Arial – Although these fonts are similar they do have slight differences. They will all create a clean modern feel to your website. Both these are sans-serif fonts and neither were originally designed to be viewed on screen.

Tahoma and Verdana – These two fonts have a very similar lettering style. However, Tahoma characters are smaller in width and appear closer together. Both add a modern feel to a website but have more style than Helvetica and Arial. Verdana is a very legible font and therefore is easier to read on screen.

Trebuchet – Another sans-serif font. This font will create a contemporary feel to your website but has more personality than Helvetica or Arial.

Comic Sans – If you are wanting to present a professionally designed website then don't use this font. Children might appreciate the informal quality of this font. However, if the website is aimed at adults I recommend choosing an alternative font. This font is a described as cursive.

Courier – This font is designed to look like a type writing font. It is described as a slab-serif font. All the characters in this font are an equal width, unfortunately this make the font more difficult to read than a varied character width font. This font might be used on sites that want to create an “old-school” feel. Or maybe sites that want to give the text a less computerised feel.