The WWW has a lot of moving parts, not all of which are interconnected. Things that slip through the cracks can result in ugly web sites, low visit times and tangled support issues.

As the saying goes, there’s no second chance to make a first impression. Web sites may wow with fancy graphics and subtle colors, but ultimately the words are what convince a visitor to take action. And all the other eye candy is for naught if the font used on those words look ugly.

When a web designer specs a font, or a font family, the assumption is that those fonts actually exist on a visitor’s machine. The designer’s machine will have myriad fonts, far more than a typical visitor’s. Fonts, more often than not are specified in cascading style sheets, but if the last cascade steps on a carefully chosen font then the browser, left to its own devices, will pick something that the designer really didn’t want.

All browsers have a default font setting, variously hidden, that is used if a named font doesn’t exist. The chances that this default is what a designer really wanted is about the same as winning a multi state lottery.

The support issue arises when a paying customer is reviewing some work using a netbook, and notices that the site doesn’t look right, yet it does look OK when viewed on a regular workstation, or a more ‘complete’ netbook. Somehow, in the customer’s mind, this is a fault of the designer. The first time through this maze took a while, but now we have a check off item that, while it doesn’t prevent this issue from happening, at least notes this possibility, its reasons and possible solutions. No one likes an I Told You So, but forewarned is forarmed.

The only way to insure that the fonts are really what the designer calls out is to imbed them in the web page, either as images or, in the case of Flash, Flex, AIR and Silverlight, by incorporating them directly in the page image, which can make for some large downloads.

© Copyright 2010 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG

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Tags: browser fonts, netbooks, software maintenance, web design

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 0:50 and is filed under Software That Works. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.