Fonts and the web
Outside of the web world we see hundreds of different typefaces everyday. In magazines, postcards, business cards, and even menus at our favorite local restaurant. It seems natural to assume that you could use any font of your choosing on the Internet. However, this is not the case.When designing web pages, unfortunately web designers are limited to the fonts installed universally on everyone’s computer. Standardized fonts carry through all types of computers, operating systems, and internet browsers. Although you may specify any font you wish, if it is not a common font chances are that only your computer will be able to display the font.
Unfortunately, at the moment there aren’t very many options if you absolutely must have a specific font on your webpage. The most common option is making the text an image. Although this solution is acceptable for small portions of text on a website, such as headings that don’t change often.
The major downfall of using this technique on an entire website is that it makes the content of you website invisible to search engines. This is quite possibly the worst thing you can do for your search engine results.
Having said that, you do have font options on the web, although limited. The below will show you the most common and safest fonts to use for your website:
Windows fonts / Mac fonts / Font family
Arial, Arial, Helvetica,
Arial Black, Arial Black, Gadget,
Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS5,
Courier New, Courier New, Courier6,
Georgia1, Georgia,
Impact, Impact5, Charcoal6,
Lucida Console, Monaco5,
Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande,
Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua3, Palatino6,
Tahoma,
Trebuchet MS1, Helvetica,
Verdana, Verdana,