WS - Choosing the Proper Font For Your Website

Imagine logging into Facebook and having a hard time reading and focusing on what your friends and family are posting. After a few minutes on the website, you'll be so annoyed with the website, you will just go onto another website. Fonts are important, but how to chose the right one?

It is my opinion that the reason why MySpace lost many of its surfers is because their font was too small, and too many times people's MySpace pages had fonts that were just too hard to read. Now with Google Code you could choose 50 more fonts that weren't available before that are even harder to read.

The rule of thumb for fonts should the closer the font is to the books we've learned to read, from children's books to school books, therefore familiar fonts are good.

Let's look at the top sites and which fonts they utilize:

Google

Google and it's family of sites, such as You Tube, strictly uses Arial and Sans-Serif for their fonts.

Facebook

Facebook uses the fonts in the following order "Lucida Grande", Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif.

Yahoo!

Arial, Helvetica, Clean, sans-serif are the fonts that used by Yahoo. What's interesting also, that Yahoo! also calls upon any "monospace" font afterward.

Microsoft

Live.com, part of the Microsoft family and the number 5 most visited website as ranked by Alexa, utilizes the "Segoe UI" as its primary called upon font followed by Tahoma, Verdana and Arial. Segoe UI is a font that was designed specifically for Microsoft to differentiate its brand, and it is the first time that we've seen a bigger variation from the top 4 websites.

Therefore...
I'd suggest to sticking to familiar that your users are accustomed to is a good idea, as learning to read a different format is a lot harder for visitors.

Source: Ezine

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