Tips on Choosing Fonts for Your Website

• Is there a way to automatically install a font on my visitor's computer when they visit my site?

  Hopefully not.
  I sincerely hope the browser makers have plugged all the security holes that made such drive-by installations possible. Imagine going to a website and having all manner of things automatically installed onto your computer. It used to be one of the methods used by spyware and adware sites to infect computers, forcing many people to install anti-spyware software to protect themselves.
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• Is there a way to embed a font in my web page so that it can be viewed with that font?

  Not at this time.
  However, a future web standard is currently being worked on that will allow fonts to be embedded (in a manner of speaking) in your web page. Don't hold your breath though. After the standard is ratified, it will take time before all the browser vendors update their browsers. That is not the problem though. The main problem is that even when new versions of all web browsers are available, the majority of people on the Internet will probably still be using old browsers which won't have the technology, and will take many years to update it.
  
  Update: the above answer is no longer accurate. Most of the latest versions of the desktop web browsers allow you to embed fonts in your web pages in a fairly standard manner.

• Can I ask my visitors to install a font before accessing my site?

  Sure you can. But will they?
  Chances are that they will just continue to view your site under some default browser font. In the end, you are better off designing your site around that fact so that your site looks optimal with that font rather than hoping they will download and install your designer font.

• Does that mean that I can never use any fancy or non-standard fonts on my site?

  Not necessarily. I realise that some people, who have taken the trouble to download good looking fonts, want to be able to use them to beautify their site.
  The only fail-safe way to make sure a particular non-standard font shows up the same in all computers is to put the text using that font in a picture, and include that image in your web page. However, this is really only useful for decorative purposes, such as for design elements on your web page, or for small snippets of text that you don't really need to be indexed by the search engines. As I mentioned before in my articles on creating search engine friendly websites and ranking well in the search results, search engines cannot "see" pictures, so you should not try to put your entire web page into an image and display that image, just so you can use your favourite fancy font. Your site will not rank well, if at all. Nor will it be usable for visually impaired people who rely on screen readers

• Why Does My Font Not Show When I View My Site on Another Computer?

  Designing your web page using one of standard lists of fonts mean that your web page will have more or less the same appearance on all computers, regardless of operating system it uses. Although this may mean that you can exercise a little less creativity in the design of your page, given the current state of affairs, it is the constraint that web designers have to work within.
  Otherwise you will end up like one of the visitors to thesitewizard.com who designed his site around a free font he found on the Internet only to find that when he accessed the site on another computer, it was displayed using a default browser font.