Why you might’t use merely any font
Here we are not talking round the graphical elements of your site but the text. The actual content of your website that the search engines and traffic will use.

Whereas you might build and test your web site with any font that you see on the selection of fonts installed, what fonts you have installed will be personal to your machine. When you buy it, depending on the software installed you will be given a set of basic fonts and a few fancier fonts and then you could install more if you want.

But the problem is if you try to use these self installed, or even merely a few of the non-standard fancier, fonts. You see when you open a webpage the details for the fonts that are used are taken from the fonts you have installed. If the webpage requires that a particular Gothic font is used to display that wording and you have it installed, then marvelous, it works fine. However, if you have not got it installed on your machine then your computer does not know how to render that font and will end up giving you something different.

The standard fonts
So when displaying text on sites we have to look at a selection of fonts that are standard across most machines. PCs and Macs. Windows XP to 7 and all of the other variations you might think of. And these fonts must render pretty much the same.

Typical fonts that are ‘safe’ to use include:

• Sans-Serif – Arial, Arial Black, Impact, Lucida Sans Unicode, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, Verdana and MS Sans Serif.

• Serif – Georgia, Palatino Linotype and Times New Roman.

• Others – Comic Sans MS, Courier New and Lucida Console.

That’s not a totally exhaustive collection and as older systems die out the list is possibly getting bigger, but it gives you a good idea of what is available.

Which to select
So, which are you going to use? Well the Serif type fonts usually look formal and could work well for sites for instance solicitors. Sans-serif are less formal and it is probably from that selection that most web-sites make their choices. And some people only hate fonts for example Comic Sans.

A small choice is a good thing
Overall, you maybe just need one or two fonts for your site. A main font and maybe a second font if you want to define a block of text as being different, as for instance quotes from customer testimonials placed on the side navigation. Possibly one of the worst things you could do would be to see how plenty of you can use on each page! Consistency is the important key.