You should see the exact same font no matter which way you visit your list. Maybe you were previewing your list from the manager admin before it had actually reranked.
If you edit your design "manually" you can type in whichever font you'd like to. You are safest to stick to the basic browser-based fonts though so that you know everyone has those fonts on their computer. If you choose something that only you have installed then it will look totally different to people who don't have that font installed. If you edited manually, you would be safe with changing all occurances of font-family to font-family: verdana; (or arial, or times).
When you add your own lists to your own top list, it won't count any hits in or out from your computer for 24 hours, and then only once every 24 hours. This prevents people from signing up and artificially inflating their hits in and out.