What are web-safe fonts?

Web-safe Fonts are fonts that are common across a range of computer systems. Web developers often choose a font from within this selection as it increases the likelihood that visitors will view your website the way you intend it to be viewed.

What do you mean by "computer systems"? Isn't a computer a computer?

As technology improves, there are more ways to view websites than ever before. As an example of what and how your visitors may be viewing your site:

• PC
• Mac
• Laptop
• Modern Mobile Phones
• PDAs

Within this, the look of a website can change again depdendant on what browser is being used. Website developers aim to create websites that function on a wide number of systems and web-safe fonts are one aspect of this process.

What happens when I decide to use a font that isn't "web-safe"?

When choosing a font for your website that isn't web-safe, there's a higher chance that the font may not be present on a visitor's computer system. When a visitor's system is lacking the specified font, the user's browser will attempt to replace it with a similar font.

Is there a way to control how fonts are replaced?

To a degree. Website developers usually define what's called a "font family" which is a priority order for fonts. If the first font is not available, use the second. If the second isn't, use the third. And so on and so on until reaching a generic font style.

Even though this exists as a method to control font replacement, this still causes the same website to look quite different among many systems if the named fonts are uncommon. A selection from the web-safe list is usually chosen.

OK, so which fonts are considered web-safe?

• Arial
• Comic Sans MS
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana

Hang on, I'm sure I've seen websites using different fonts to this list!

There are various methods to show specific fonts that are not on the web-safe list. Often this includes saving the text as an image and uploading this to the website (for example, logo files commonly do this) or the use of Flash.

In both cases, this is detrimental towards the search engine friendliness of your website as Google and other search engines are not able to read image and Flash content without aid. Alt and Title text is often used to aid image indexing by search engines, but this would prove quite troublesome if pages of text were represented as an image!

There are some emerging technologies that can achieve good font-substitution while allowing good SEO results - such as SFIR (Scaleable Inman Flash Replacement).  While this works well in come cases, it does take longer to render and is not supported across all platforms.  This is an area where new techniques are constantly developing, so watch this space.

Why is the search engine friendliness of my website important?

Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are one of the most common ways new visitors find your website. The search engines have bots (robots) that scour the web for new websites to index and serve up to users based on their search terms.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a complex area in itself but the basic element relevant to having text as text (and not an image) is: If the search engine bots are not able to read your website ... they will skip over all the great content you have.

In summary: web-safe fonts...

... keep your website looking consistent and professional across the largest variety of systems while being friendly towards search engine indexing.