When Rachel Baker created the Font Awesome Icons Plugin, it brings a new means of replacing the standard icons that you can use in your website. The plugin was only a mere rebirth of the original font icon created by Dave Gandy for Twitter Bootstrap which is now available through Rachel Baker’s Font Awesome Icons Plugin for WordPress. Using the plugin provides you more liberty of designing your icon fonts to suit your website design. However, while this may be a good thing for some website owners, there are some people who view using the Font Awesome Icons plugin to be a disadvantage. Here are some insights about why some view the plugin beneficial while others find it as otherwise.
The Advantage of using the Font Awesome Icons Plugin
Web designers find it too cumbersome to use a lot of images on a website as it could use a lot of web space owing to their file size. It can also be too tasking to correlate these images to your HTML and scaling problems might occur along the way. Using the Font Icons will help you use a scalable image to use on your website irregardless of the size and scaling factors. Thus, whether you are using different font sizes, the icon font remains to be the same causing you less issues when designing your website.
Webmasters like to take advantages of the feature of the Font Awesome Icons Plugin for their WordPress site because it offers more scalable font images and icons that will be limited only according to the size most suited to their website. Thus, the pro in using the plugin comes with the convenience of web designing when using images in web designing where you use one icon that can be adjusted to varying sizes without scaling issues.
Moreover, the Font Awesome Icons PlugIn provide various types of choices that will suit your media icon needs from video to social media icons. As you choose from the wide choices available, you can try different sizes without the risk of losing the definition of your images. The fonts and icons can be adjusted in terms of their transparency and color without worrying about disturbing their definition and size quality that will suit your website.
As a web designer, you will like the flexibility of using the Font Awesome icons within the various regions of your website from the sidebar, header, columns, content, and stacks. You can use it in like manner as embedding the font face thereby letting you use scalable icons that you can manage similar to using the CSS codes. The Plugin also gives you a cleaner system when managing your icons because you can keep the color and size variations of the font based icons in a single file.
Some downsides worth noting
While there seem to be many pros that can be derived from using the Font Awesome Icons Plugin, it is worth noting that it comes with some cons too. In some cases, some find it difficult for screen readers to read the font icons and often mistaken them as alphabet letters. Using only a single icon may result to a smaller image size which makes the plugin better to use only when you are using multiple font icons. Lastly, the font characters are available in single color but using the CSS3 offers a solution to tweak the font icon colors according to your preferences.
With these minor disadvantages of the Font Awesome Icons Plugin, it remains to be a good option to use by those owning a WordPress site. The application is free and provides better convenience in managing font icons that will optimize the font and icon image source management for your website.
About the Author
Nisha Pandey is a guest blogger and marketing analysts. She contributes news about web, marketing, web design, business and other seo thingsat her personal blog seotechyworld.com