Dominique Stender Good software is only the beginning

Web enabled custom fonts with cufón

A frequent issue in web development is the clients wish for individual fonts for this site. This ranges from the understandable desire to maximize the companys corporate image by using the corporate fonts to more or less useless eye candy such as in headlines and menus.

The solution that comes up by reflex is to use graphics, often auto generated. But keep in mind that graphics are meaningless for search engines. Your SEO suffers if you use graphical headlines (the most important bits of information as far as search engines are concerned).

The next solution is flash. Google is able to read flash, so your SEO might suffer not that much. But what about your visitors? Ok, Flash is installed on virtually any PC these days. But not on the iPhone. So do you care about your mobile visitors? I think you should.

Furthermore, I use the NoScript Firefox extension as a security measure to disable JavaScript and many other "dynamic" content such as Flash by default. So I won't see your Flash headlines - all I see is a nasty empty box with the NoScript logo. Don't think I'll enable Flash just to see your headlines. Chances are that I leave your site in favor of another one with similar content, without flash.