Think Beyond the Competition 2

When it comes to choosing the "accessories" of you lawyer website, such as colors and fonts, you may think the flashier the better. Unfortunately, this is not the case. You must actually think about what the user will see on their monitor versus what you see on your monitor.

Fonts

Fonts - there are thousands of them out there. Everyone knows the usual culprits. For example, Georgia, Trebuchet, Arial, and Verdana - these fonts are what we call "web safe" fonts. They are safe because they are default fonts that everyone has on their own computer or any computer they happen to be using. The most commonly used and easy to read are Georgia and Trebuchet.

To Serif or Not to Serif

It is recommended to always use a sans serif font because a monitor, no matter how good it is, has less resolution than a piece of paper with words printed on it. The serif part of the font tends to blur making it harder to read. Without the serif, the words are cleaner on the screen. Verdana was actually a font created just for use on the web.

Color

Again, as with fonts, colors vary from monitor to monitor. You want to choose a web-safe color that all monitors running on a 256 color palette are able to see as you see it. When choosing the colors you want to use, there are hexadecimal codes that are used instead of the "name" of the color. These codes define the color. To find these codes and colors, look up "browser safe colors" for your choices.

When designing your first website or redesigning your current site, remember to think about what users may or may not see on their side of the monitor. It may look hip and unique from your chair, but their eyes may see black when you see gray.