Are You Losing Traffic Because Of Your Website Font?
Posted in Optimize And Monetize, WebMaster by DB
Far fetched? Maybe, but when you have about 2 - 3 secs at the most to engage a first time visitor to your website, even the slightest of advantages must be given its due consideration. Some very interesting observations were made by the Software Research Usability Laboratory, Wichita State University based on a usability study conducted a while back. I’ve summarized the main points below
- Content that uses the Arial and Times font were read significantly faster than Courier and Georgia.
- Content that have a font size of 10 were read slower than content with a font size of 12.
- Arial and Courier were perceived to be the most legible fonts.
- Times and Georgia were perceived to be the most attractive.
- At 12 point, Arial was the most preferred whereas Times was the least preferred.
- At 14 point, Comic was the most preferred whereas Times was the least preferred.
Though dated, the article makes a good read. You can read the complete article here
This got me thinking. Am I the only one who has not heard of this before? Maybe all the top websites and blogs have this factored into their design. I did a quick check of a few popular news sites and blogs and found the following
No pattern as far as I could see. Anyway, what does this now mean to you and me? Reading between the lines, the study seems to suggest that if I were to start a blog, the best font option would be “Arial” as “Arial” is optimized for quick reading or scanning of textual content. However, if I were to sell a product online, Georgia or Times would seem to be the best fit.
I’ve always tended to use Arial as my default font for many of my websites without any thought or design. What about you? How do you go about picking a font for your website?
One Response
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March 19th, 2008 at 6:09 am
Yes, it was a big problem which i used to face in my past weeks thank you for giving good suggestion.