One of the easiest ways to alter the appearance of your website is to include suggested fonts in your site’s style sheet.

Originally, you had to list a number of fonts in your style sheet (ultimately finishing with the appropriate “generic” font family type as a final fall-back), hoping that people reading your website would have at least one of the suggested fonts installed on their computer.

CSS 3 lets style sheets include references to downloadable fonts, which do not need to be installed on the reader’s computer, but can be downloaded by the web browser from the web server as needed, and then used on the page. Fonts suitable for use in this way need to be converted to the WOFF web font format, and, of course, can only be used in this way if the font licence permits it.

There are now a significant number of fonts available with open font licences, which mean that they can be freely used on the web. Many of these fonts are hosted by third-party websites, which make them available for use as it means that downloading of these fonts by website visitors can, unfortunately, be tracked and used for advertising profiling purposes.

As these fonts have open licences, as a website author, you can instead download these fonts and serve them from your own website instead. There is a useful website which lets you download web fonts from one of the large font repositories.

How to download web fonts for local hosting / Use/Less by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0