Last year I created a microwebsite for some children in school who were working on a project based around the iPad app 'Epic Citadel', and a story start set within that land by Tim Rylands. I wanted the site to match the feel of the land, and that included how the writing looked on screen.
The problem I had was that although I had lots of fancy fonts on my computer, I couldn't guarentee that viewers would have the same font and see the site in the same way I could. It's a tricky job finding a web friendly font that you know will be available on users devices. In the end I found some web based services that could achieve that, and opted to use a service called Typekit that allowed me to select one of their fonts. Through a little bit of web magickery that font could be 'attached' to the website and therefore seen by others when they viewed the site.
It was a good solution. It worked well, although there were a few issues with viewing the font on iPads and iPhones (some characters would not display correctly), and made the site work as I had initial hoped.
Typekit allows a single font to be attached to a site without cost (you do get a small logo appearing in the lower right corner of a website though if you opt for the free service). However if you want to use the fonts on more than one website / blog / site then costs are involved...
...which leads me to the good news because Google have released GoogleWebFonts. Looking at the service it does almost the same as Typekit does - you choose a font, you grab some code, you add it to your site, and then you get to use a fancy font on the site. Best of all though, there is no cost at all. It's free!
I tried it earlier on a site that I'm preparing for a school project to start in the new school year - I wanted a hand written look to the font and this is the result (you can see the first image is when viewed on a computer, and the second image from an iPhone)
(The top 'welcome post' is an image, and 'Archives' is left in it's original font style to compare)
It's a simple process. There's no need to log in. There are just four steps with Google WebFonts. You just (1) choose the font you want to use on a website / blog, click through, (2) choose the characters you want (Latin for most of the fonts), (3) choose either a standard "link" / an import / or some javscript that you copy to your website (the 140word project is a Typepad theme, and so I just copied the @import code into the stylesheet for the site).
Finally, (4) add the name of the font to the areas within your site where you want the font to appear.
In Typepad, it's done (in a theme) like this...
(ignore the other gumph - that's just to change the colour, add rounded edges and other things to the posts)
That's it - you're done! A simple way to create a site with exciting fonts that ALL users can experience.