How do you choose a font for a website?

Question

I am not web-designer, more of a web app server side developer. Like tone deaf, guess I am font blind…Perhaps I dont know what I need.

When you look at Facebook its

font-family:"lucida grande",tahoma,verdana,arial,sans-serif;

stackoverflow

font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;

gmail

font-family:arial,sans-serif;

nytimes.com

font-family:georgia,"times new roman",times,serif;

Wikipedia

font-family:sans-serif;

How do people arrive at a decision? Is it a factor of the rest of the page design? Why are there so many variations in these websites? Is there a standard for readability?

Answer 1

Here on SO:

• Font Typeface selection for the web
• What is the most readable/appealing font

Otherwise it's important to say that for the web there is only a very limited range of fonts because in order to make sure people see what you want them to see, you have to chose a font that everybody has on their system.

[edit] As this answer was made the accepted answer I figure I should improve it.

I recently found blog entry that has a very helpful overview concerning web fonts and the different operating systems.

Furthermore a very good explanation of the anatomy of web fonts.

Cool&new: Dynamic text replacement

One really cool new technology for sites where it is important to implement a non-standard font for e.g. h1 or even h2 tags is sIFR. This blog post shows how it is implemented.