Choosing the right fonts for your website is an important consideration when building your EverWeb made website. Fonts help convey to your visitors the image of your business that you want to project, in combination with your site’s color palette and other media that you may use in your site.
Fonts in Your Site’s Pages
Choosing the right fonts may seem difficult, but with a couple of strategic decisions, this can be easier than you think. You might want to start by defining the fonts that you want to use for your page titles, subheadings, sub-sub headings and body text. For all of the titles and headings, we recommend using just one font For the body text, choose a different font, but one that compliments your headings font. In this way you only have two basic font styles in your website. This approach is recommended as it’s visually better for your visitors to read. If you use too many font styles it can make your pages too busy and will frustrate your visitor. A simple, clean approach to page design is usually better for visitors.
For the headings, you can use different point sizes for the title, subheading and sub-subheadings. Typically, though, you should only use two to three levels of heading at most in your site. Any more and it’s liable to confuse your visitors.
For the body text, make sure that you use a point size that is readable. Typically 16-18 point is best for most people. Styling your body text is also easy as you can use bold and italic as needed within your text. Usually. underlining text is to be avoided as this is usually reserved for hyperlinked text.
You may also want to think about one extra font for use in footnotes or legal text. This typically will be in your body text but at a small point size, e.g. 12 point, as it’s not information that you will want to bring your visitors attention too.
Font types
There are two basic types of font that you will choose from: Sans Serif or Serif fonts. A Sans Serif font is one that doesn’t have small projections at the end of its letters, e.g. Helvetica, Arial and Futura fonts. A Serif font has these projections at the ends of its letters e.g. Times Roman and Garamond. In your site you can use either one or the other or both types of fonts, that’s up to you. Often for readability, most people go with a Sans Serif font for titles and headings and a Serif font for body text. There’s no real rule here though. Go with what looks best on screen.
Using Google Fonts
One of the best places to find the fonts that you may want to use in your site is Google Fonts. EverWeb supports Google Fonts, so using this site to choose your own site’s fonts is really a no brainer. Google Fonts has a vast range of fonts that you can try out as well as giving you recommendations for secondary, complimentary fonts. If you choose a font for your headings, then finding an appropriate complimentary font for your body text is simplicity itself.
Using Fonts in EverWeb
Once you have selected your Google Fonts, it’s easy to use them in EverWeb, especially if you have EverWeb 4.0 or higher. You should see the Google Fonts that you need listed in the Fonts dropdown in the Text Inspector. if you’re a Mac user, you will also see a live preview of the font if you are using EverWeb 4.3 or higher.
If the font you want is not listed, you can download the font you want from Google Fonts, then add it in to your system fonts so that it is available for use.
You can access your fonts at any time through the Fonts button in the Toolbar. In a blog post, we recommend using this as the fonts button in the blog post editor shows only web safe fonts and you have to click on the More… option to see more fonts. The More option calls up the Fonts Panel.
Adding Fonts Choices As Default Styles
After choosing your fonts, you can save yourself lots of time and effort by applying your choices to Paragraph Styles in the Format’> Default Styles… dialog box. Here you can assign your font choices to existing Paragraph Styles or create your own. In addition, this is a good time to set up the default font for text boxes using the Body Text Font field and its default point size using the Body Text Font Size field.
Heading Tags and SEO
One last thing to remember when choosing your titles and headings is that they can also be used in your site’s SEO as heading tags. Simply select e.g. your page title, then go to the Text Inspector.In the Export Options section, click in the SEO Tag dropdown menu and select the H1 option. You should only have one page title per page and this should always be an H1 tag. For your sub headings you can use one, or more, H2 tags, and for sub-subheadings use the H3 tags. It’s not recommended going any further than H3 on your page, otherwise you will lose the SEO effect.
Summary
Adding fonts effectively to your site is a great way to define how your business looks on the internet. It’s also a great way to add in SEO as well at the same time.
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