Why are we limited by the font?
A website relies on the person who is looking at it to have the correct font on their computer. So while you might have a lot of fonts on your own computer there is no guarantee that everyone who goes on to your site will have the fonts that you like on their computer. This will cause a problem when they view your site, as it will show a different font which might not looks very good on your site and could also break the layout.
This is why “Web Safe Fonts” are most commonly used, and while they can be a little boring because most sites use the same ones, there is a reason for them. This is because they are found on pretty much every computer be it Windows, Mac or Linux, which means that when a site is viewed the user is guaranteed to see the site how you meant for it to be seen because they will have the right font.
Why not just use images for the text, that way any font could be used?
While images are fine to use for small amounts of text, like for headings and sub headings, it is not a good idea to do this for a lot of it. Here are just a few of the problems you might encounter if you did use images for all your text:
- Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing will see all this text simply as an image which will mean that indexing a site that uses just images will be hard as the search engine cannot pick up on keywords and place your site ranking in a high position is unlikely.
- Some visitors could have images switched off when viewing sites, which means all they will get is a blank page.
- Some visitors will use screen readers and rely on the text being spoken to them, which can’t happen if it is all an image.
So while your site might not have the fonts that you want to use on it, you will get the most out of your site by sticking with a fonts that everyone has. This way you know your site is being viewed correctly, it is user-friendly and search engines will be able to see what your site is about.
