I Had No Idea Choosing a Blog Font Typeface & Color Were So Hard!

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It’s taken me hours of research, but I’ve FINALLY settled on my Wordpress “web safe” font typeface and “web safe” font color. As long as it’s taken me going back and forth, you would think I was decorating my kitchen and searching for the perfect tile flooring at Home Depot! But as simple as this task may sound, it can mean the difference between 1,000 blog readers and 10,000 readers.

So exactly what does a
“web safe” font typeface & “web safe” font color mean?
It means a couple of things:

It fits the character of your website. You’ve spent hours searching for the perfect Wordpress Theme (ask me how I know), so it has to flow with the overall layout of your WP blog.
It is easy for the reader to actually READ (a novel idea I know)! But sometimes webmasters get more into how “pretty” a font or color is than how easy to read it is. Because guess what, if I can’t read your site then I’m not going to hurt my eyes trying.
Widely available across operating systems and browsers. This was something new for me to learn that not everybody is using the same operating system (Microsoft VISTA as I write – I know don’t judge) and Firefox 3.5. Who would have thought! But in all seriousness you want a font that is available in all operating systems, browsers, and on top of that able to support older versions like Windows 98 or Internet Explorer 6.0!

So now that we know what a “web safe” font typeface and “web safe” font color means,
which one are this “web safe” you speak of?

Let’s start with web safe font colors.

Apparently there are some 250 shades of blue! But only a handful are “web safe.” Meaning it’s readable to people and widely available to computers. A simple Google Search for Safe Hexadecimal Color Codes will return you millions of results. A good reference I use is @ http://www.december.com/html/spec/colorsafe.html.

There are some 16.7 million possible color values (or 16,777,216 to be exact). But this websites summarizes them into a slim 216 web safe font colors. The hexadecimal color values range from #000000-#FFFFFF. Our eyes cannot actually detect the difference between all of these colors. And more importantly all of them aren’t people friendly and computer friendly. So why waste your time?

Web Safe Font Typeface

What is the best web safe typeface is a highly contested debate. Many websites say Verdana because it’s good for smaller font sizes and thus has become popular among webmasters. But the double edge sword is it looks silly for font type 12pt or larger in the body of the text. (See Why you should avoid the Verdana font.)

But with all the fonts out there it breaks down to two types of fonts: serif and sans serif. Serif fonts are those that have fine cross-lines at the extremities of the letter. Sans serif (“sans” being the French word for “without”) are fonts that don’t have serifs. The most common serif font is Times New Roman. And the most common sans serif font is Arial.

The way you specify your desired font in HTML is by using the attribute. The best practice is to specify several fonts or a font family so if a user’s computer can recognize the first you have a backup that is similar to what you specified.

For example, if you want to use serif fonts, your HTML code will look like this: <font face =”Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif”>. That way, your visitor’s browser will try to load Verdana first, but if it doesn’t have it installed it will try the next one on the list, in this case Geneva ; if it doesn’t have it either, which is highly unlikely, the browser will choose the third option, which we have specified as any other sans serif font.

Give this to your webmaster for best web safe font typefaces

Complete list of Common fonts to all versions of Windows & Mac equivalents (with examples)

Here is a website with a little bit more pros and cons of each font http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/fonts.html.

But regardless of whether you care about the explanation of font colors and font typeface or not your Wordpress Blog readers depend on you to make this simple, but important decision. In the world were everybody has a opinion and wants to blog about it, the different between your website and the next guy can come down to something so simple as the fonts you selected.

You can freely reprint this article. Just include the following resource box at the end:

LD Freeman publishes SocialMediaMarketingTechie.com, an internet marketing content packed site with useful articles and resources where you can learn Web 2.0 Makes Headlines, but How Does It Make Money.

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