Let’s cut right to the point today.  Unlike opening up your word processing software or graphic design program and creating exactly what you have in mind, selecting from a plethora of hundreds of different attractive fonts to use, the way fonts work for your website is quite bit different.  In order to maintain compatibility across the widest variety of web browsers and devices possible, there are strict standards, rules, and guidelines that must be followed on the web.

This Current Practice Is Here To Stay.

Basically, even though new technologies for using different fonts in web design are on the brim of reality, for the near future, best practices will still demand the use of just one of a few web-safe fonts.  While the list is slightly different depending on PC vs. Mac use, the most commonly utilized web safe fonts include:

• Arial
• Helvetica
• Courier
• Georgia
• Lucida
• Tahoma
• Times
• Times New Roman
• Verdana
• And a few more…

Again, it’s slim pickin’s, but these fonts are considered to be universally safe to use in web design—meaning that they’ll render reliably (or at least similarly to how they’re supposed to appear) on almost all web browsers and devices.

The Upcoming Promise Of CSS3

There are some cool new features and capabilities coming forward with the advent of CSS3, including the ability to use a wide variety of fonts; the future of fonts in web design looks bright indeed!  But again, there’s a catch.  It’s great technology, but until it goes completely mainstream, which could take years and years, it’s not really all that reliable.

Of course, there are also a few other tools and techniques that can be used to “implant” a certain font you’d like to use onto a website.  The thing is, they’re just not going to work for everyone—in fact, they very well might not work for most.  For the time being, in order to be compatible with mainstream web browsers, it’s important to specify and design around the standardized list of fonts.

This isn’t to say that it’s not impossible to present new fonts on the latest compatible web browsers, it’s just that you’ve still got to use backup.  A designer doing so will have to plan, design, and fully test the compatibility of using a cutting-edge modern font option with ensuring scaled-back compatibility with older generation browsers.  It’s more work, more time, and naturally, more money.

Isn’t There A Better Way?

Unfortunately, right now there really isn’t.  Some will use graphics to present the fonts of their choice—and appearance-wise, this works great.  However, even though it’s perfectly okay to do in some circumstances, there are also several caveats to using graphic-based text components on a website.  Two of the main fallbacks include causing significant problems with Usability and SEO.

Fonts are important.  Typography has been a staple of graphic design (and the field’s ancestors) for hundreds of years.  Make it attractive and don’t clash by overusing fonts in your design, but also, keep it as simple as possible to be on the safe side.

WordPress seems to have become all the rage over the last year or so.  More and more businesses and organizations are turning to the open source web software platform to power their blogs and websites, and some are even using it as a full-fledged CMS (content management system).  And this is where the problem begins…

Now first things first, let’s make it clear that WordPress is pretty cool blogging software.  In fact, the blog you’re reading right this moment is powered on the back-end by WordPress.  The software was designed for blogs and it’s quite good at powering a blog with all of the right tools and features built right in.

But to use WordPress as a CMS to power an entire website—can this possibly be a good idea?  Unfortunately, the answer is, “No it’s not a very good idea at all!”

WordPress was designed to be blogging software, not CMS software.  Here are three specific examples:

1. WordPress is awfully “heavy.”

In other words, the software is loaded up with a feature set that is great for blogging.  But these features just kind of add extra baggage when it comes to using the system for CMS—they can really make a site sluggish.  Also, because of the extensive blogging feature set, the user interface is full of options and features that will only serve to confuse a CMS user whose primary goal is to add or update website content.  On the other hand, a well-designed CMS system is very clean, simple, and straightforward to use for even the novice user.

2. CMS requires more plug-ins.

To effectively use WordPress as a CMS requires the use of numerous plug-ins.  While using a couple of plug-ins is okay every once in awhile, the fact is that each different plug-in developed by different programmers with different skill sets interfaces in a different way with the blogging software and with other plug-ins that are installed.  The end result can be a compatibility nightmare—especially when a new release or update to WordPress comes out and all of the plug-in developers must scramble to get a new plug-in version together to be compatible.  We won’t even mention the plethora of potential security issues that arise from this scenario.

3. It’s not designed to organize large amounts of information.

Because WordPress was designed primarily to be blog software, it does great with categories and tags—the foundation of blog organization.  The problem with using it as a CMS for a larger website lies in the fact that it depends on the installed theme to establish a proper website navigation structure, and most available CMS themes just don’t handle the task very well at all.  Although it’s the standard for blogs, using time-based content presentation (where newest content forces older content down the list into obscurity) is not a good way to organize most website content.

Sure, go ahead and use WordPress to power your blog (or the blog portion of your website).  This is exactly what it was designed to do, and it works great for this purpose.  But be aware of its pitfalls and limitations before planning to deploy the popular blogging software as a full-fledged CMS.

SEO – The commonly used acronym for “Search Engine Optimization.”  Most often used to describe the practice of optimizing a website, through both on-site and external supporting factors, in order to increase the site’s ranking and prevalence in organic search engine listings for specified keywords and keyword phrase searches.

Organic Search – Organic search results refer to the search engine listings that are essentially free.  These are usually the main body of search results shown for any given search query, excluding the paid search results (PPC ads) shown on the side and/or above and below the main body of organic listings.

PPC – Stands for “Pay Per Click.”  This is a method of paid search engine advertising, wherein a website owner bids on ads pointing to their site that are to be shown within the search engine results pages (SERPs) when a certain term is searched for.  Each time a searcher clicks through via the ad, the bid-for or pre-specified amount is charged to the site owner’s PPC account balance.

CPC – This means “Cost Per Click.” CPC refers to the bid or specified cost for each time a visitor clicks through on a PPC ad to the website.

CTR – Stands for “Click Through Rate.”  Basically, CTR is the percentage or ratio of how many times a PPC ad is clicked on by searchers, compared to how many times it is shown or displayed.

SEM – Stands for “Search Engine Marketing.”  Basically, SEM is the practice of using SEO, PPC, and other forms of online search engine advertising and promotion to attract visitors to a website via the search engines.

Backlink – When another site links to your website, this incoming link to your site is referred to as a backlink.  Having quality backlinks that are both relevant and on-topic helps a website achieve better search engine rankings.

Link Popularity – This is basically a relative score of how many incoming backlinks a website has from other sites around the web.  Google PageRank is one popular and reliable measure of link popularity—although it does take into account additional relevancy factors beyond the sheer number of backlinks a site has.

Anchor Text – This is a word or phrase that is highlighted and selected to be linked to another web page or website.  In other words, when you link to another site or page, these are the words that a visitor would click on to visit that site or page.

Meta-tags – These are markups within the code of a website that include components such as title tags, header tags, descriptions, keywords, image titles, and so on.  Correct use of Meta-tags can effectively support a website’s search optimization strategy by providing helpful background details and clues to the search engines about what a web page is about and which parts of the page are intended to be most important.

SERP – Acronym standing for “Search Engine Results Page.”  When you perform a search on one of the search engines, the listings page that comes up for your search query is a SERP.

Search Engine Spiders – Search spiders—commonly referred to as search bots and sometimes as robots—are the programs that the search engines use to analyze and review your website to determine what it is about and how well it should be ranked within the search index.

Black Hat – Black hat is a term commonly used to describe using SEO tricks and techniques that are against the policies of the search engines or are in some other way against the best interest of the visitor (and are simply used to “trick” a searcher into visiting a site).  A few common black hat practices include doorway pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing, and spamdexing.  The bottom line is to steer clear of any of these SEO methods—while they might work for a short-term boost of traffic, they are unethical and will eventually get a site banned or substantially penalized by the search engines.

White Hat – The polar opposite of black hat SEO is what we would call “white hat SEO.”  It is the practice of following the guidelines, policies, suggestions, and terms of service set forth by the search engine companies to maximize a website’s search performance by providing the search engines with exactly the information they want to see in a helpful, organized manner.  Using white hat SEO puts the interests of the search engines and their visitors first and foremost—it helps search engines provide more accurate, helpful, and relevant results to their visitors.  It’s a win-win proposition for all involved.

You’ve probably run across several web designers who insist on using Flash to create websites.  Most have good intentions, but are just not fully aware of the pitfalls that come along with relying too heavily on Flash web design.  Others are probably just really bad web designers altogether.  Enough said about that.

But one thing is true.  Regardless of what you’ve heard, using Flash on the web has some really great applications and some that are, well, just not very good at all.

For example, a couple of good possible uses might include:

• Using Flash for video. Flash-based video has more or less become the iron-clad standard for streaming video on the web.  It works very well.
• Using Flash for image libraries or other “widgets” or “apps.” Flash works nicely as a sub-component in many photo sharing slash portfolio types of website applications.

That said, it’s still probably best to use Flash components on your website as sparingly as possible.  And it’s all for very good reason.  In fact, Google themselves has even laid forth the shortcomings of using Flash on websites.  They spell it out very concisely and clearly here on their Webmaster Central Blog:

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

Now when talking about ranking well in the search engines, it’s hard to argue that Google’s position on Flash isn’t pretty much definitive.  The more you use Flash as a component on a website, the less the search engines are even able to recognize it—let alone effectively rank it.  Search spiders are getting better at understanding Flash, but there are still severe repercussions that can be completely avoided in entirety by choosing to use a more universal web design platform.

In Summary

Even though many web designers insist on using Flash-based websites, it’s just not a good idea if you plan on attracting organic traffic from the search engines.

• Flash effectively prevents search engine spiders from recognizing and understanding your site correctly.
• Without being able to understand your website, the search engines are not able to rank or list it appropriately within their search indexes.
• Flash can also be non-compatible with certain web browsers and mobile browsers (meaning visitors using these browsers will see a blank space or error message instead of the site as intended).

Don’t become overly afraid of using a small Flash component or two on your site.  But just don’t fall into the trap of using it for the entire site…unless you’re trying to prevent visitors.