On the surface and to an untrained eye, web design might seem like a fairly straightforward process. Choose a color scheme you like, pick a font or two, set up a navigation menu, and there you have it, right?
Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near that simple. Effective web design takes not only aesthetics, but also aspects of marketing, psychology, and usability into consideration. It’s just as much about understanding how users will perceive certain elements as it is about personal preferences.
Font choice, specifically, impacts web design in two major ways. First, it’s vital from a usability perspective. If your site features a typeface that is extremely difficult to read, you’ll have a hard time achieving the primary goal of any online content – conveying information to visitors.
How legible your font is will influence whether visitors stick around and learn more about your brand, or abandon your site out of frustration and turn to a competitor instead. It also plays a role in your site’s accessibility, as small type and fancy scripts can both be difficult for visually impaired users and those with dyslexia to decipher.
The second way font choice impacts the quality of your site’s design is when it comes to branding. Although we often focus mostly on the substance of text-based content, it’s also smart to consider it from a visual perspective. You want to set the right tone for your site.
All this goes to say that if you’ve found the perfect WordPress theme but its default font is either difficult to read or doesn’t fit with your brand identity, it’s well worth the effort to change it.
