You are here: Home / Archives for Web Site Design

Why Can't You Use The Fonts I Want?

July 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Often a client we are design­ing a web­site for wants a par­tic­u­lar font and we can­not use it. There are a num­ber of rea­sons why we may not.

1. The font is not licensed for web use.
2. Its a font that many peo­ple don’t have on their com­puter
3. We feel it is ill suited from a design point of view, for pro­ject­ing the pro­fes­sional image required for their suc­cess­fully mar­ket­ing their site.

Rea­son one is often a shock to peo­ple who assume any font they have on their com­puter is free to use for what­ever they want. Not nec­es­sar­ily so.

Rea­son three is based on our expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge of what works but in the end, we defer to a clients wishes. It is, after all, their site.

Rea­son two is the one we most often encounter and the hard­est to explain. The fonts we have on our com­puter are dif­fer­ent depend­ing on whether we are on a PC, Mac or Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem. Also they can dif­fer depend­ing on which soft­ware we have. For exam­ple, after we upgraded our ver­sion of Microsoft Word, we found we had a bunch of cool new fonts installed.

For a per­son to see a font used on a web page, it has to be installed on their com­puter or it is replaced by a generic com­puter font or the same type, Serif, Sans-Serif, etc. So if we use it on a web page, you will see the page fine, another vis­i­tor may not.

What a pain!

This font issue became a thorn in the side of web design­ers wish­ing to be more cre­ative on their pages as well a please clients, so workarounds were used. One such workaround is instead of text for a head­line, a graphic depic­tion of the text was used instead. There are down­sides to this, the biggest being the extra expense of cre­at­ing a graphic. Another workaround was to try and force vis­i­tors to down­load the font when they visit the site. This has down­sides as well, such as dis­con­cert­ing peo­ple with a down­load prompt when they arrive and degraded site per­for­mance. Intel­lec­tual prop­erty /licensing vio­la­tions was another poten­tial prob­lem with this workaround.

Over the years was very lit­tle progress in find­ing a solu­tion that sat­is­fied font design­ers, who deserve recog­ni­tion for their cre­ations and that worked with­out impact­ing the web­site user expe­ri­ence or load time in some man­ner. So we have been stuck with the same old safe fonts. The tried and true like Arial, Ver­dana, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Geneva and Geor­gia. There have been addi­tions to the ‘safe to use’ list of fonts but no good solu­tions to the prob­lem itself.

Things are finally improving…

Over the past few years, hosted font ser­vices have emerged and are pro­vid­ing a much needed dash of flair to the web by over­com­ing the issues I have out­lined here. Depend­ing on the ser­vice, you need to reg­is­ter and pay a fee but most have a lim­ited free level or some fonts that have no licens­ing fee. Here is a list of few of these services:

http://www.typekit.com/

http://www.webtype.com/

http://www.fontdeck.com/

http://kernest.com/

The best news for last…

There are many more and new ser­vices com­ing online all the time… But the one that is mak­ing a big splash right now is from…

Drum roll… You love me, you hate em, you can’t live with­out em… Google. Yes, they now have a great new font host­ing ser­vice. It’s easy to use [for us tech savvy web devel­op­ers] and all the fonts are free. Some restric­tions may apply such as lim­it­ing use to only the web with print projects not allowed. It’s best to check each one.

 

You still might not be able to have the exact font you want on your web site, but at least now there are some jazz­ier options to pick from that you know are safe/legal to use. What we rec­om­mend is, if they want some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent on your site, hop on over to Google Web Fonts at http://www.google.com/webfonts and pick a few.

We sug­gest you test them using the para­graph option tab as well as the sen­tence option. You want to see how they will look in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. The selec­tion isn’t huge yet but will likely grow over time and as I men­tioned, the ser­vice is free. Pick out a few choices and send your web team [us hope­fully] the names and we’ll know what to do with them. It’s best to keep the final choices for the site  at two, but no harm in send­ing more to pick the two from.

Share
Filed Under: Google, sharing, Web Site Design

Independent Business Owners Are Not Borg

March 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Resistance is futile...

Most peo­ple plan­ning an impor­tant event, such as wed­ding (for exam­ple), would never con­sider wait­ing until the last minute to book a caterer, rent tuxe­dos, buy a wed­ding dress, make arrange­ments for a florist or to book a recep­tion hall. Book­ing well in advance is advised and in fact, a must for secur­ing many pro­fes­sional ser­vices. They will not be avail­able otherwise.

The same is true when sched­ul­ing work with an inde­pen­dent busi­ness owner / entre­pre­neur that you have con­tracted to do work with.

If a client waits until too close to dead­line to advise need­ing the work done there can be a sched­ul­ing prob­lem. (This is where I get to the Borg part). Some­times there is an assump­tion that once con­tracted it is just a mat­ter of idling away in the back­ground await­ing ‘a command’.

Inde­pen­dent busi­ness own­ers / entre­pre­neurs do not work with a sin­gle client. Inde­pen­dent busi­ness own­ers / entre­pre­neurs can­not sit at their computer/phone/blackberry just wait­ing for work  None of us would sur­vive if we did this.

In our own busi­ness we pride our­selves at always do our best to ‘drop every­thing’ when it is an emer­gency and hav­ing a fast turn­around time. Even so, like other pro­fes­sion­als ser­vices, like your­selves, we need to sched­ule our work / your work. To keep our busi­ness suc­cess­ful we need a full sched­ule to prosper.

To all our suc­cesses —  (we will not be assim­i­lated :-)

Share
Filed Under: Entrepreneur, Independant Business Owner, sharing, SOHO, Tips, Web Site Design

Domain Registration & Hosting

November 27, 2007 By Leave a Comment

A new client of mine ran into a prob­lem that I have seen too often and thought it would be of inter­est to my readers.

When you hire a web design com­pany it is very impor­tant that you have an under­stand­ing, at the very least. Hav­ing a con­tract in place is much better.

Why?

Well, for one, if you have your web com­pany pur­chase your domain name for you, and arrange your host­ing for you, it is impor­tant that both of these are reg­is­tered to you and not the com­pany that is doing the web work for you.

Now, it is not unusual for a web design com­pany to pur­chase the domain name and arrange host­ing for the client, but the client’s name should be listed as reg­is­ter and the web design com­pany as tech.

In the case of my new client, and oth­ers I have worked with, they come to me for changes, or redesign, of their site only to dis­cover that, in fact, they do not own the domain name, they can­not get any infor­ma­tion on the host­ing and even worse, depend­ing on the com­pany, they have no rights to their web site even though they have paid for it.

If you do not pur­chase your domain name or arrange for your host­ing just make sure that you receive proper doc­u­men­ta­tion so you do not find out, down the road, that you don’t own your web site.

Read sim­i­lar arti­cles here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html

Copy­right© JBCR Vir­tual Solu­tions 2000–2006
Share
Filed Under: Web Site Design

Slicing and Dicing an Image to Create a Website

August 13, 2007 By Leave a Comment

One process many clients don’t under­stand is ‘slic­ing and dic­ing’. When we first cre­ate a client’s unique web tem­plate, the ban­ner, side menu, etc., this is done as an image. In most cases it is not pos­si­ble just to stick up and ban­ner and have a back­ground color with a light inner table, except with cer­tain sales pages or ezine tem­plates, for example.

Why Slice and Dice to Cre­ate a Website?

The short­est and sim­plest answer is the smaller the file size of the images used in a web page, the faster the page will dis­play. This in itself is a good enough reason.

Web­site vis­i­tors tra­di­tion­ally have a very short patience span. Broadband’s steady pro­lif­er­a­tion has not changed this. If any­thing, vis­i­tor expec­ta­tions is now that pages should load instan­ta­neously. At rate, the longer they have to wait for a page to dis­play, the more likely it is you will lose them before they have viewed your offerings.

So how does slic­ing and dic­ing pro­duce faster page display?

Have you ever seen a page with cen­tral table with shad­ows to make the table appear as if it were float­ing on a layer above the page? Here is an exam­ple using a site we devel­oped: http://www.iaccweb.org/ . The left and right edges of the cen­tral table are tiny tiled ver­ti­cally to pro­duce the effect of a solid graphic. The slice is a very small file size, so takes much less time to dis­play than if we had used a side graphic big enough to fill the required area. This brings up another rea­son — why we slice and dice images.

Read more of this arti­cle here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Dice

Jan

Copy­right© JBCR Vir­tual Solu­tions 2000–2006
Share
Filed Under: Web Site Design

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 101 Part 3

July 27, 2007 By Leave a Comment

In our pre­vi­ous seg­ments of this report, we dis­cussed how you can real­ize a higher ROI by sav­ing money on web­site update by using CSS, Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets.

Sav­ing money is mak­ing money, but in addi­tion to sav­ing you money, a web site that uses the min­i­mum amount of code required to “make it all hap­pen” gives addi­tional money mak­ing advan­tages too!

MONEY MAKING ADVANTAGE

KEEP THOSE GOOGLEBOTS HAPPY (AND OTHER SEARCH BOTS TOO!)

Search engines send out auto­mated soft­ware called “crawlers” or “spi­ders” to look through web­sites for con­tent to list. Those crawlers have a lot of Inter­net to cover. It gets big­ger every day and as it gets big­ger the crawlers get less patient about the amount of code they have to wade through to extract what they came for, which is your con­tent. Help the bots help your client/customer find you. Keep the code used to dis­play the con­tent as min­i­mal as pos­si­ble. This way they “crawl” more rel­e­vant, index­able con­tent, and less code before they move on.

Cur­rently crawlers are set to check the first 250 lines of code on a page and then move on to index another page. They index from the code view, not the text view you see. This is impor­tant to remember!

Read more of this arti­cle here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#3

Copy­right© JBCR Vir­tual Solu­tions 2000–2006
Share
Filed Under: Web Site Design
Next Page »

Switch to our mobile site