As mentioned earlier, ideaLaunch focuses a great deal on how to create optimized content that is engaging for readers while also being SEO savvy. That isn’t to say that we ignore another major component of website development: how it all looks.

Font plays a part in your audience’s web content experience. Your choice can both leave a gut impression (professional vs. amateur, polished vs. ragtag) and affect the effectiveness of your piece (readability, easy for scanning, cuts down on scrolling) – both of which can impact conversion rates (a.k.a. the amount of people who are willing to pay for your services or products).

Here are some quick tips to help you decide the best font for your website:

1. Never use Comic Sans. Ever.
2. Research suggests that sans-serif fonts (like Arial, Helvetica and Tahoma) are easier to read on the web and serif fonts (like Times New Roman, Garamond and Bodoni) are often easier to read on paper. Many designers use both – a sans-serif font for the main body text and a serif font for larger titles and header text.
3. Use a font people will most likely have loaded on their computers. Just because you’ve decided to place Rockwell in your website’s code does not mean that people will see it that way. A font has to be installed in an individual computer’s system in order to view it. Otherwise, the computer will choose a default font – which can greatly affect the way the page is viewed, especially if you haven’t tested it properly. If you’re concerned, run some A/B split tests to see how different fonts impact the website experience. It’s best to be sure: Code Style has a listing of the most common fonts installed in computers.
4. Even if you are very much in love with a not-so-common font, you should not create a jpeg full of body text just for the sake of using your specific font:  If you have an image of words instead of organic, dynamic text, none of the information in that copy will be picked up by a search engine. Any time you’ve spent researching optimization and weighted keywords will be wasted (for more on this, check out our tips on Creating Content For Search Engines).
5. People have different preferences and default settings when it comes to how large a website appears on the screen. Don’t fight it. Make sure your designer or programmer is coding font sizes in relative terms (i.e.: Titles at 110%, large text at 90%, body text at 80%), rather than a set-in-stone point size (i.e.: 12 pt). Just be sure that default font sizes are large enough for most people to read comfortably (usually 10 or 12 pt).
6. In case you forgot – never use Comic Sans.
7. When in doubt, use one of these most popular, readable fonts in your content marketing: Arial, Helvetica, Futura, Tahoma, Palatino and Verdana:

Great fonts for the web. Images from Wikipedia

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.