Fonts for Your WordPress Website

By Lisa Sabin-Wilson from WordPress Web Design For Dummies

Selecting the right fonts that you want to use in your WordPress website is an important part of branding an online identity, so knowing where to find the right fonts and tools to help you make the right choices gives you a good head start.

Typography is to the art, design, and visual look of the typeface used in print and website design, most commonly known as fonts. You see creative uses of typography in everything from newspapers and magazines to greeting cards and billboards, but you also see it used on websites — both in the content body and in graphics and logos.

As a web designer, you use typography styling on your website design projects in two ways:

Body content: These are the fonts, including the size, style, and colors, you use for the content, such as published articles, pages, posts, and so on. The typography styling used in this area is controlled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) through the use of style definitions.
Graphics and logos: This refers to the fonts you use to create graphics for logos, icons, buttons, and other graphics designed for the website project, typically using your preferred design and image-editing software, such as Photoshop.

Fonts come in different shapes and sizes and, for the most part, can be grouped into common categories in terms of their style and type:

Serif: These fonts have decorative elements, such as tails, or curlicues, at the edges of letters.
Sans-serif: These fonts have straight edges and don’t have decorative elements. Generally, sans-serif fonts are considered easier to read on computer monitors.
Script or decorative: These fonts resemble cursive or handwritten type. These are generally not used to display content because they can be difficult to read at small sizes.
Monospace: These fonts have letters that are all the same size and width, with no variation. Monospace fonts are typically used to display programming code.

These categories of font styles are generic styles that reference fonts commonly used in web content; however, hundreds of font styles are available to use in designing graphics, logos, and other design elements created in your preferred software.