You’ve decided to design a website for your business. Or, you’ve decided that it’s time to make a couple of updates to keep up with the latest web design trends. Either way, if you’re working on bettering your website, you’re making a good decision.
As advances in web design rise, it’s important to stay up to date. Your website’s visitors will expect your page to flow smoothly and to lack any frustrations. The best way to ensure that your site is user-friendly is to first ensure that your font types are user-friendly as well.
How do you do this? There are a few tips and tricks that you should keep in mind when choosing the right font types. Continue reading to learn more!
Size Does Matter
When it comes to typography, you want to be certain that it’s readable. If it doesn’t have great readability, then you’re risking the chance of losing some readers. Your visitors should be able to read through your website easily and without confusion.
A good way to ensure this is to define a hierarchy in your text. Text that is more important should be the larger text. Text size should go down in order of importance.
Shorten Your Text Block
Another good tip to follow is to shorten your text block. The text block is how many words show per line. For example, the smaller the text block, the more your text looks like a column.
The wider the text block, the more your text looks like a paragraph. Stick to smaller text blocks, ones that allow around 45-80 characters per line are great for readability. Anything more than that is harder for visitors to read.
But you should also take into account those who are accessing your site using mobile devices or tablets. For mobile devices, a text block of 30-40 characters per line is ideal while a text block of 60 characters is ideal for a tablet.
Give Enough Space
Giving your text enough space also increases your website’s readability. You want to choose a font that is clearly legible. When words in a font are distinguishable, the reader only has to focus on why the words are there: to sell your product or service.
If a font type that you choose if hard to read and the letters blend into one another, then your potential customer is going to spend more time trying to understand what it’s saying rather than on purchasing your products or services. This may also cause frustration, which sometimes leads to a visitor leaving your page.
Limit Number of Typefaces
Consistency is key, and you don’t want to have too many typefaces on your website. Try to keep the number of typefaces that you have on your page as low as you can. Having too many different typefaces is overwhelming for your website’s visitors.
Depending on the function of your specific website, it’s best to stick to about 2-4 typefaces. You won’t want any more than this. And keep it consistent.
Use the same typeface for the same type of function that a text serves. This way, without evening knowing it, your visitors will associate a certain typeface with a certain page function. Choose one typeface to use on all the headers and another to use on all of the navigation texts.
Keep Performance in Mind
If your web design has a large file size, then this might slow down your website. Always keep performance in mind when choosing font types and designs. If a page is slow to load, then this leads to higher bounce rates.
Be sure that elements of a design aren’t loaded as images rather than text, as this will also affect the load time. The resolution of your font is also important as some font types don’t work well with certain screen sizes.
Follow Your Brand’s Guidelines
If your brand already has guidelines for design, stick to them. Match existing brand fonts and keep consistency. These guidelines may cover the colour scheme, logos, typography, and other brand elements.
It’s important to design your website with your brand guidelines in mind if you already have them set.
Fonts that Fit Your Brand
If you don’t already have a brand guideline, then you should choose fonts that fit your brand’s voice best. If you’re a law firm, then you might want to choose classy and professional fonts. But if you’re a vintage shop, then you might want to choose an old-school font.
The choice is ultimately yours and what you believe fits your brand the best.
Web Safe Fonts
Not all fonts work with everyone’s computer. Some fonts require viewers to have that specific font downloaded in order to see it correctly. You want to have web safe fonts on your site that’ll guarantee that all visitors view the font correctly.
Sticking to Google Fonts or having a developer convert your fonts to web-safe fonts is the best way to ensure this. Nothing is worse than creating this beautiful website that looks completely different and off balance to your visitors using different browsers and devices.
Choosing the Right Font Types
Having a well-formatted website is one of the best ways to grow your business. This is why it’s so important to choose the right font types. Putting a website’s design together is challenging, especially when you want it to be perfect.
Follow these helpful tips and tricks above to ensure your font types and designs work amazingly for all viewers. And when you need a helping hand from an expert, be sure to contact us as we’ll work with you to provide you with the web design services that you need!
