As a website promoter, you are often stuck with the dilemma as to what are the main elements you should focus for a great website design that helps you to attract, retain and engage visitors to your site or blog.
Well, besides the layout of your website, images, colors, user-friendly design, there’s one more important element you need to work on to increase the overall appeal of your website.
And that is the fonts you use to display the content of your website. Fonts have the in-built capacity to either engage or repel your website visitors.
Although there are several fonts, which you can, choose to showcase the content of your website, but more importantly there are only few fonts which turn out to be successful over the web.
So if, you want a successful website, one of the main tasks for you is to select the best fonts for your website.
Why Font Selection is Important for your Website
A right kind of font is absolutely needed for your website. A good font facilitates the reading of content on your website. Visitors and customers feel encouraged to read the text, and they never have to “try to read” the text. Actually, reading becomes a natural phenomenon. It just happens. The importance of a font is further increased by the fact that it helps to build the identity of your brand in front of your visitors and establishes a better communication with them.
So you see that a right kind of font is extensively easy to read which engages visitors to your website and they love to read the content on your reading. When visitors understand the text on your website, they begin to like the content and in turn promote your website to other audience, as well. This brings new visitors to your website.
Some Basics about Right/Best Fonts
Though you can get a lot of fonts choosing a right type of font can be somewhat tricky. There are certain basics about fonts which you should consider for choosing the right type of font for your website. These basics are the essential characteristics which you should consider while selecting a font for your website. So let’s see what the basics of a Right or Best Fonts are. We have also listed some factors, in addition to the basics about, best fonts, which are equally, important to consider enhancing and improving the overall readability of the content on your site.
Readability
One of the most essential characteristics of a right kind of font is that it should be readable. Your visitors should enjoy reading the content rather than face difficulty in reading it. You should make it a point not to use ugly looking fonts which instantly repel the visitors from a site. So choosing a readable font makes you defeat the competition from other sites. Your visitors like to read the content posted on your site and so the popularity of your site also increases.
Font Size
Font Size does matter a lot in the ultimate readership that you get for your site. You have to pay attention to the font size of the titles, headings, sub-heading, and also for the body copy of the content, as well. There is no ideal font size, however, using 12px or 14px is usually considered readable font size for the body copy of your content. The ideal font size for titles, headings or sub-headings, can also vary, and there is no standard size for them. They can be big enough so as to be able to draw the attention of visitors to your site. You can experiment with different font sizes so as to find the most appropriate font size for your website content.
Font Color
Font Color is another very important element to consider for promoting the readability of your site. With Font Color, you can rather enhance the overall readability quotient of your website. Moreover, other than the Font Color, the type of contrast chosen to display the text also plays an important role in delivering readability to the visitors. Black text over white background is usually taken to be standard color choice for your font. However, you can consider other color variations in font color and the background of your content area.
Tracking
Tracking is yet another important thing to remember other than the type of font. Although the font type might be alright, but if the space between the letters is not adequate, it affects the overall readability of your content. This is actually referred as tracking that is the space between the characters in your content. Tracking is essential for the titles as well as for the body copy. Tracking helps to increase the visibility of your website content. Letter spacing of 1px to 2px is generally considered adequate to give a great tracking effect and helps to make the content more visible and readable, as well.
Leading
The spacing between the text lines is an important factor which determines the readability of the content on your site. If you have not used proper leading, the text becomes practically impossible to read. Using the line-height property of CSS, you can adjust the leading for your content. If you have a large amount of text, then leading should be greater than for a small amount of text.
Being Unorthodox
Implementing what others are generally not using on their sites in relation to fonts is considered being Unorthodox. For example, using highly-thin titles for your content can be regarded as being unorthodox. It can help to make your content look different from the rest of the sites.
Hierarchy
Establishing visual hierarchy is another factor which determines the level of attention you can draw to the content on your site. Hierarchy in your content is established by the size of the font it’s color, the weight you use for the font and well as their actual placement. In order to establish a visual hierarchy, you have to consider the titles, headings, even the sub-headings and the body copy, as well.
Pairing
Usually a website is filled with lots of content or text. In that case, using one type of font would not help you to strongly project your content to the visitors of your site. Pairing can greatly ease the situation. You can go for one type of font for titles and headlines and use type for showing the body copy. This is called as Pairing. Using contrasting font types greatly helps in displaying the content strongly and can effectively communicate the message across to the users. You can test different pairs of font types to come out with the best possible font pair for your website content.
Which Font Types You Should Prefer (Web Safe Fonts)
Although there is a wide variety of a font type, such as simple fonts as well as fancy fonts but the problem is that most of the fonts are not compatible across different operating systems. So ideally you should prefer web safe fonts which are standard and common font types and are available with almost any of the operating systems. Thus with web safe fonts the visitors have no problem reading your content on any of the operating systems. He can continue to enjoy reading the text on your website. Some of the most popular web safe fonts include Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Courier New, Webdings, etc.
So you can now appreciate the importance of a right type of font for your website. If you pay attention to the above characteristics of fonts, you can select the right and the best font for your website. With best fonts for your website, you can enhance the readability of the content and thus can help to engage, retain, and attract visitors to your site.