Selecting the right font for your website is one of the most important decisions you can make for your website.  Font styles impact moods and emotions.  They can present a friendly spirit or set forth a cold and rigid tone.  That being said, unless you are ready to get into some heavy coding, your choices are limited. 

Even though you may have hundreds of wonderful fonts available to you on your computer, you have to keep your end user in mind.  This time you must consider not only what they want to see, but also what they are capable of seeing.  Fonts are not embedded on your web page; your specification is actually nothing more than a reference.  Your users can only see the fonts that they have previously installed on their computer.

This can be quite a limitation when you consider the various operating systems (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and the various software packages that install fonts for you.  Because of this, it is important that you understand a little about the choices that are available to you and some simple ways to give yourself a leg up while choosing fonts.

When you develop your webpage, your best bet is to make use of a property in CSS known as a font-family, rather than using a single font.  A font-family is set up as a prioritized list, beginning with your preferred web font, followed by a list of core or web safe fonts, and finally ending with a generic font.  Using the font-family, you are free to specify any font that you like, but it is important to include, as a minimum, a generic font as a backup, just in case.

An example of a font-family definition on your webpage follows:
font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium, Arial Narrow Bold, Arial, sans-serif;

Below I have given you some additional information regarding the generic font and the core and several web safe fonts: 

Generic Fonts
The good news:  You have a set of fonts that you can always depend on.  These are the generic fonts.  They are your fail safe, the ones that will always display if the user has nothing else available. 

The bad news:  There are only five generic fonts (serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy, and monospace).

Because it may be hard to find information about how the generic fonts will appear, an example illustration has been provided.

Serif fonts have have short horizontal lines added to the tops and bottoms of the letters (serifs).  The image below shows a serif font, highlighting the serifs in red.

 

Sans-Serif fonts are missing the serifs.  The image below shows a sans-serif font.


Cursive fonts have joining strokes or cursive characteristics beyond italics. 


Fantasy fonts are mainly decorative characters.  Common fantasy fonts are hard to come by and the generic font that replaces it certainly is not in the least bit decorative.

Monospace fonts have characters with the same fixed width, similar to a manual typewriter.  This is often used to display samples of computer code.

Core Fonts
You can reasonably expect that most people will have this list of core fonts on a PC (and on most Macs) due to a licensing agreement between Microsoft and Apple.  The core fonts include:

Serif
Georgia
Times New Roman

Sans Serif
Arial
Arial Black
Impact
Trebuchet MS
Verdana

Cursive
Comic Sans MS

Monospace
Courier New

Web Safe Fonts
Beyond the core fonts, you may want to take a look at the following list of fonts which are often considered to be web safe.

Serif
Palatino Linotype

Sans Serif
Franklin Gothic Medium
Lucida Sans Unicode
MS Sans Serif
Tahoma

Monospace
Lucida Console