Newspaper studies show that readers take in the image first, then the headline, the subdeck, the call-outs (enlarged quotations) and finally the text itself. The eye's trajectory isn't much different online.
People like pretty pictures. Deliver.
Art brings a blog alive and rivets readers: humans are very visual creatures, after all. So give your audience a dose of eye candy, but strategically...
DO: Start posts with an image. Should you want it to run the full post-width, go for a horizontal photo. This lets readers see some text without scrolling, drawing them into your original content.
DO: Dot images into the text, drawing the eye down the page and breaking up large "grey" chunks of text.
DO: Learn more about image-compression and trouble-shooting it.
DON'T: Roadblock readers with full-width images in the middle of a post. This interrupts the continuity and flow. Place these at the top or bottom. Save small and medium photos for the body. (An obvious exception is when the text comments upon the image, such as a screen grab for the class blog.)
DON'T: Drop in elaborate background images (or worse yet, elaborate tiling ones). These make text difficult to read.
DON'T: Try to shoehorn a vertical image into a horizontal design space (the header, for example). Grief will ensue. An html whiz could customize a template around this, but the average blogger probably doesn't have the time to acquire chops like that. Two options: hire a designer with a proven track record on your platform or create a horizontal collage incorporating the vertical image.
DON'T: Be a pirate. Whomever presses the camera shutter, owns the copyright, unless they sell or share it. We'll dig into the details of all this later. But for now, stay legal with photos you took yourself or asked permission to print; images whose creators have been dead for more than 75 years; and those from clipart or sites like Wikimedia Commons and Flickr's CC-licensed pool.
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