Digital Agency, Digital Agency Perth & Melbourne, Online Marketing Agency Australia, Digital Media Marketing - Digital Dialogue

Until very recently, the web has been very restricted in terms of the available fonts. Most browsers and operating systems only supported the standard web fonts (Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia, Courier and a couple others), which means that most web designers have been very limited in terms of font selections.

In order to add a more attractive font to your website, the safest option is to use images. Whilst this give you complete control over the look and design, it has quite a few limitations such as increasing the page size and making the text "un-searchable". 

Recently a few companies have been providing services to enable the use of other fonts on websites. However it's not until last week when Google announced the launch of Google Webfonts that we got excited!

Continuing with Google's commitment to Open Source, Google Webfonts are an easy and efficient way to include some stunning fonts in your website. Upon launch last week, there are approximately 200 fonts available, however Google says there will be more than 2,000 fonts to choose from within the next couple of months!

There are a number of benefits of using Google Webfonts on your website:

• ALL web browsers are supported - yes, we've tested and can confirm that even IE6 works!
• website will rely much less on using images which will improve speed for users
• whilst the use of Google Webfonts is calling the Google API to load the font, due to Google's large infrastructure there is no negative impact on load speed - in fact using Google Webfonts has increased the speed on our tests due to the reduction in images used
• implementation is quick and easy with only 1 line of code required

To implement the supported fonts in your next design, you may need to install the Google Webfonts Adobe Plugin from www.typedna.com.

If you'd like more information on how Google Webfonts may benefit your web presence, please don't hesitate to get in touch.