The constant battle over fonts on a web site, is there a solution in sight? Clients always want to have beautiful fonts on their web sites, the only way we have had to do that and assure that “everyone” can see them has been to use images. The issue with images of course is that they have to be downloaded, have to be worked into your layout and they don’t get the same SEO (search engine optimization). Now Google has a beta solution for us.

So what is the big deal about fonts. Presently a web site can only display a font that is installed on your computer. So to make sure that everyone sees the same exact thing on every computer (more or less – lets not go into different browsers and different versions of different browsers…) web designers end up using a short list of fonts that all computers (both Macs and PCs) have pre-installed.

Unfortunately, clients are not satisfied with the limited amount of fonts that are presently available. There are some work arounds to this such as Font Burner, which has a WordPress plugin – but it is only compatible up to WordPress version 2.8, while WordPress is up to version 3.0.3; or hardcore code, which Internet Explorer and 64-bit Windows machines don’t render correctly – so these are not a perfect fix.

Now enter stage left – Google Web Fonts. Yes Google. They have approximately 38 fonts (with a smattering of variants) that reside on Google’s servers and you can use their API to make your text beautiful. And as of last week they work on most mobile devices including Android, iPhone and iPad. There is even a WordPress plugin (compatible up to version 3.0.3) for Google Fonts that has had over 12,449 downloads! Is it the answer to our web designer prayers? The jury is still out on that (it is still in beta), but it does look exciting! We’re looking at using it on our site…check back soon to see….