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.

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

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

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

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