Why does my font look thin and pixelated?

[ibeme]

Hi,

I'm quite new to web-design and CSS, and I have a problem that I can't solve.

I'm using the following CSS code:

body {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;
font-size:12px;
}

It's really quite simple, but the text on my page is looking a bit sick. Basically, it looks pixelated, almost like it's been printed out by a dot-matrix printer. I can't show you my web-page, but there is a perfect example of what I'm talking about here: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx

My text looks like the text in the footer of this page, but I want it to look the text in the left hand column of the page (higher quality). Considering the fact that this page has both the high quality and low quality version leads me to think that I'm just not selecting the correct option, or setting the correct default somewhere.

Any ideas on how I can resolve this issue?

Regards

[Wickham]

In addition to the normal and bold styles, you can select font-weight much more closely between 100 and 900, although small font-sizes should not have a high weight.

See http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font.asp