fontburnerFont Burner is a website that allows you to use your favorite fonts when designing a website. When building a website, designers are limited to a small list of fonts that most computers come installed with. Someone visiting your site needs to have the font you specify in order for them to see it, otherwize a design will specify alternative fonts and the browser will move down the list until it finds one the user has installed on their computer. This process takes away a lot of creative controll over how the site looks. Most computers these days have Flash Player installed. Font Burner and the sIFR project have found a way to take free fonts, add them to a library accessable by flash, and then replace heading tags with a mini flash version that’s still accessible to search engines. It’s a huge step forward for web design.

How it works:

Font Burner uses sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) technology. In short, it hides your titles and replaces it with flash. By hiding the title instead of removing it, you retain all the information that comes with the HTML title. This is great for SEO because Flash has very little SEO and using it on a site means that it and everything inside it is invisible to search engines. One small downside is that you cannot select the text for cutting and pasting. Another downside, slightly more sinister, is that it replaces every heading tag, not just the titles. It would be nice if they could develop that into their next revision but I wont hold my breath.

How to use Font Burner:

There are two very simple ways to use Font Burner. The first, find the font you wish to use on the site and cut the embed code out of the font’s page. For instance:

<script src=”http://www.fontburner.com/fontburner.js” type=”text/javascript”></script> <script src=”http://www.fontburner.com/js/black/aardvark_bold.php” type=”text/javascript”></script> <!– sIFR fonts delivered by www.fontburner.com –>

Then paste this code before the body tag in your page’s HTML. That’s it. You can further customize the colors using CSS.

Secondly… Font Burner, after my own heart, has developed a WordPress plugin to make it even easier for WordPress users. Install the plugin, choose your font and colors and hit save. Now every page and every heading/title has been changed to your custom font. Installation of either will take 15-20 minutes and is pretty idiot proof. It could potentially clash with another plugin or script you might be running (I’ve seen nothing of this sort) but be sure to backup your site before tinkering. I’m using it on this site. Looks nice huh?

Now if only they can tap into a way to use commercial fonts and not just free ones…?