Tying up loose ends.
I hope you have a better understanding of what it takes to create, launch, and maintain a web site after reading this long information. I want you to know exactly what you are getting into should you decide to go it alone, or even have this knowledge should you decide to have a professional handle your web site details. This will give you some idea of what a professional must know, do, and be responsible for and give you an idea why some of us are more than others in terms of cost and ability. My saying is you get what you pay for, and I fully believe this wither is about web design, plumbing work, or book keeping costs. We have professionals in a field for a good reason and one is not necessarily as good as another. There are lots of us web design professionals around, in a variety of cost structures. I try to be somewhere in the middle, not the highest but certainly not the least. I strive to gain a certain market share in a specific market and price my services accordingly. I do offer my clients the best I have and continue to improve both my skills and my knowledge as the web and its technology is ever changing.
I told you earlier I would get more into the typography information later in the writing. This is where I will expand just a little.
I am a designer by nature, I spent my time in college learning commercial design and art forms and have come to love certain typefaces and the use of different typefaces to create a well balanced and designed site. However, you learn very quickly in the web world that unless a particular pc has the chosen typefaces you have selected to deliver your message, they will not be seeing it the way you do. There are basically only 5 web-safe typefaces that can be used with a web design. The rest will be defaulted to the nearest of the 5 unless the person viewing the site has the typefaces you chose to use. One way around this, and what I was eluding to with the Illustrator reference is to create your type as a graphic object. That will take care of the use of type to design the specific look and feel and insure your visitors will be able to view it as you intended. The problem with this is that search engines do not read graphics, they only read text. So if you over use this technique, your web site will rank much lower than you would otherwise because the type that can be read by the human eye in the graphic, cannot be read by the search engines robots and spiders which decide upon the ranking of your pages. This is an issue that is not easily remedied. So unless your message cannot be said with one of the 5 web safe fonts, consider the use of graphic type setting as an alternative, but to be used sparingly. This way the search engines will be able to match your content to the keywords and phrases that were typed into a search engine by a potential client.
Happy webbing.