"What the font?!"

A lot of the professional blogging sites I read have been featuring New Year's Resolution-themed posts with all kinds of suggestions for improving your blog. Surprisingly, these lists rarely contain tips like: try stringing together a coherent sentence or learn the rules of grammar for your language.

But one topic that frequently gets mentioned is font choice.  Recently I've learned which fonts are the most common...the easiest to read...and why (in this case at least) size does matter.

Personally, I've always been an Arial kind of gal.  Not so much that I'd name my child after it or anything, though I have been known to call loved ones "Helvetica" on occasion.  But when it comes to creating documents or sending e-mail or customising my blog(s), Arial is my first font of choice.

Unfortunately my hosting service Blog-City, which I love in all other respects, does not allow me to set a default font and text size for creating entries. (Or maybe it does and I just can't figure out how to do it.) So I have to select Arial and the proper text size each time I write a post, and sometimes I forget, which results in teeny, tiny non-Arial text that's a pain-in-the-@$$ to read.

But I had no idea just how often I forgot until earlier today when I was reviewing the entries listed under the Readers loved headline in the right-hand sidebar. This list is generated by Blog-City's own statistics tracking software (meaning I have no way of manipulating the numbers it produces) and includes the five most-read entries across the entire blog. It is, for all intents and purposes, a "Greatest Hits" list, if you will. The five most popular posts I've written in the two-plus year history of ShazzerSpeak as selected by readers. So imagine my surprise to discover that no fewer than FOUR of them were posted in teeny, tiny non-Arial text. Gaaahhhhh!!!

So I've spent most of the rest of the day trying to calculate just how many more times they might have been read had they been legible.

tags: blogging  

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