Website Font Restrictions

There are thousands of fonts out there, and no one can possibly have every one installed. So if you use an uncommon font in your webpages, and the person viewing your page doesn’t have your font installed, your page will not look the same. Usually, that’s considered undesirable.

For this very reason, Microsoft, Apple and other computer companies established a set of standard fonts that were installed on every computer.

Below is a link to a wikipedia article that has samples of each standard web font.

Core fonts for the Web

A Workaround

There is a way to ensure that the font you want will appear exactly the way it’s supposed to on every computer, but it comes with some major drawbacks.

Using a graphics editor like Photoshop, a designer can create a graphic containing the text. The graphic is then placed in the page and it loads just like a photograph or logo.

But there are some big time negatives to this workaround. First and foremost, search engines can’t read them. Basically, any words that appear in a graphic are invisible to Google. Google and other search engines love plain text.

Another drawback is that it takes longer for a browser to load an image than it does to load plain text. So if load times are a concern, if many of your customers are in rural areas with slow Internet connections, stay away from this workaround. You’ll just make them angry as they wait for your page to load.

And one last gotcha when using this workaround is the fact that it takes your web designer longer to both create and then edit your site. Say you want to change the text of a button or a headline. Instead of being able to just hit the backspace key a few times and type in the new text, the designer has to go through many more steps in order to make the change. And that may end up costing you more in the long run.

So to sum up:

Pros:

• You can use any font you want
• It looks the same on any computer

Cons:

• Search Engines hate graphics
• It takes longer to load graphics than plain text
• It takes longer to edit or add a new item.

Reference:

• Core fonts for the Web

Jesse Grosjean is the founder of Hog Bay Software, a successful shareware business that designs and sells software for the Apple Macintosh. Hog Bay Software has been around since 2001, and has recently enjoyed a fresh surge of popularity around the Internet after the successful execution of a marketing strategy, and I thought that there was a lot to learn from Jesse’s story.

The shareware market

Shareware is a “try before you buy” method of selling software that’s been in common usage since the late 1980’s. The software is usually downloaded for free from the developer’s website and has a limited trial period during which the potential customer is allowed free use of the application.

The shareware software business is a crowded one. And the Macintosh shareware market is especially so. Macs have a much smaller piece of the market share relative to Windows users, so there are fewer customers in general, but the Mac platform has a very active shareware community, thusly shareware market is crowded with the products of very skilled, talented and passionate developers.

It’s a struggle to find and fill a niche that’s not already overcrowded. It’s difficult to create original applications that haven’t already been created (and better executed) by another developer. And lastly, and most paradoxically, to design a tool that will stand out as a must-have utility for users, but won’t be eclipsed by Apple itself taking the functionality and including it for free in it’s next operating system release.

Then, on top of the challenge of creating a superior product (a feat in and of itself) a superior marketing strategy is needed to bring the product out of obscurity and place it on the hard drive of potential customers.

Hog Bay’s formula for success

There are 4 clearly identifiable areas that make Hog Bay a successful shareware publisher. And the first two were accomplished before Grosjean put on the salesman hat.

1. Good Products

Hog Bay publishes quality software.

I have personal experience with Hog Bay Software. I purchased the Hog Bay Notebook (now Mori) back in 2002 or 03, and it was a great product. Great features. Great fit for my writing methodology. A solid piece of software that I enjoyed using.

In fact, Mori was successful, it’s value increased to the point where Grosjean was able to sell it to another developer. Since then, Grosjean has released two new apps, Writeroom and Task Paper, that have been well received by the community at large.

Grosjean’s talent and skill are put to work developing high-quality, reliable software.

2. Good Customer Service and Support

Software has bugs. This is just the nature of the beast. Even the most well-funded and well-trained software developers don’t put out flawless products.

In the software biz, features may get attention, but good product support often goes farther than cutting edge features when it comes to closing the deal. A good customer experience not only keeps current customers happy, it also brings new customers into the fold via word of mouth.

I also have personal experience with the support side of Hog Bay Software early on, and the developer was quick to respond and professional. And, now, while I don’t remember exact details of the issue, I still remember the experience. I still recommend the software to friends who are new Mac users.

The user of Hog Bay products is assured a good experience when the inevitable software bugs surface, and they know that the products will continue to be updated and maintained by the developer.

3. Knowledge of his target market, discovery of his niche

TaskPaper is the newest product on the market from Hog Bay. It’s a Mac-only, Getting Things Done-based to-do list application, and it joins an increasingly crowded marketplace full of apps with similar goals.

The Mac user community is a small, but passionate one. And Grosjean numbers among them. So he’s built his software to appeal to Mac users.

But TaskPaper has carved out an even more specific niche by centering itself around manipulating a plain text document that’s easily manipulated by any other program that works with plain text. This is a big deal with a certain sub-set of productivity-minded Mac users. And Grosjean knew this when he set out to develop the application.

TaskPaper isn’t the magic bullet of productivity apps. It doesn’t try to do everything for everyone. It’s a tool specifically designed for one thing, specifically targeting a class of potential customer who value a specific philosophy when it comes to their software.

So he’s found his niche: Mac users who follow the GTD methodology of productivity and prefer to store their data in plain text formats.

4. A solid strategy for marketing the software to the target market.

Now that the product has been developed, the challenge then becomes how to get his highly specialized application to his target market?

The developer posted a blog entry describing how he approached this problem and solved it. In a nutshell, he took advantage of the blogosphere to generate word of mouth.

He offered free licenses of TaskPaper to bloggers who wrote reviews of the application. He also offered free TaskPaper licenses to reviewers who write about WriteRoom, the other Hog Bay product.

Additionally, the developer offered a limited time discount immediately following the release in order to get business from early adopters.

Check out Grosjean’s blog post “TaskPaper, my indie launch story”. It’s a great, first-hand example of how to leverage the skills, the talents, and the advantages you have into making your business a success.

Links

TaskPaper, my indie launch story

Interview with Jesse Grosjean, Founder of Hog Bay Software

Mori Product Page (Apokalypse Software Corp)

Wikihow.com has an excellent 6 point How-To article on correctly using apostrophes, a practice that will put a professional polish on anything that you write for public consumption.

Avoid using an apostrophe to indicate a plural. The incorrect use of an apostrophe to form the plural is called the greengrocer’s apostrophe, since grocers are often the worst (or at least the most visible) offenders. If you have more than one apple, then use apples, not apple’s. If you can’t replace the word with “his” or “their” and if it isn’t a contraction, then there shouldn’t be an apostrophe there.
Well worth the 15 minutes to read. I have an English degree and write every day, and I still read over this just to reacquaint myself with the rules.

—
Link – via Lifehack.org