Dimensions — the most important dimension when placing images is width, as it can affect other elements in your layout. Once a convention for image width is established, it’s best to be consistent throughout your site. Height can vary to some degree, but a consistent look is best and too much variation can also affect your layout.

Placement — placing images randomly on a page or in a blog post often looks busy and disorganized. Some good practices for placement:

• Float (align) Right
• Float (align) Left
• Full width of the content area
• A row of smaller images that fill the full width of the content area

My personal preference for floating an image is Float Right, because the reader’s eye can always return to the same place on the page to start the next line of text.

It’s good to avoid placing an image that has no float and doesn’t fill the width of your page. The result is extra white space beside your image that breaks up the page display.

Copyright — be sure you own the photos, or have permission to use them. It’s never a good idea to grab images from other websites.

Storage — photos should be stored on your web server with the rest of your website. It’s not a good idea to link to external photos on another server (website), because if that site is taken down or that content is removed from the external site, your image disappears.

Photo Links — unless you specifically want an image to link to something, it’s best to set Link To: None. If the default of linking the photo to its original is left in place, the user clicks on the photo and the larger image loads in the same page, taking the user away from the site content and making navigation confusing.

Borders/Captions — again, it’s best to establish a convention and stick with it. Whether you want borders on your images or no borders, generally stick with one or the other. Ideally, the same should apply to captions or, at least, to the default WordPress frame that comes with captions. If you want to use captions on some images and not others, it may be best to style the frame to match the rest of your images (or have your web developer do it).

Character Spacing — computer fonts are proportionally spaced. Unlike typewriters with mono (fixed) spacing, computer fonts (with a few exceptions) adjust spacing automatically, based on the context in which they are placed. It is for this reason, that a single space after punctuation at the end of a sentence is appropriate. Two spaces at the end of a sentence is a convention that was established with mono-spaced typewriter fonts. The result of using two spaces with proportional fonts is a river of white running down the page.

Line Spacing (Leading) — this is something you probably won’t adjust, but generally smaller type size on larger leading is more easily readable than large type on narrow leading.

Other Spacing — stick with the established convention for spacing before/after headings, paragraphs and other layout elements. This will give you a consistent, clean appearance to your site and minimize the possibility that it will become busy and disorganized over time as you continue to add content.

Emphasis — quotation marks (“) should be used when quoting something a person said. They should not be used to emphasize text. Instead use italics or bold attributes for emphasis. Underlining text is not advisable. It can make it look busy and more difficult to read and, on a website, it can easily be confused with hyperlinks.

Alignment — generally, the best text alignment is flush left, rag right. That is: aligned on the left side and allowed to wrap naturally on the right side. The flush left gives the reader’s eye a consistent place on the page to return to start the next line. Rag right is a visual cue for differentiating one line from the next. Newspapers often use full justification (flush on both sides), to make the most of limited space. It works reasonably well in the narrow newspaper columns, but can be difficult to read in wider layouts like a web page. Given that English is read left-to-right, flush right or center-aligned text is better used in specialized circumstances where the text is brief and presented more as a design element than text.

Column Width — columns that are too narrow or too wide are difficult to read. It’s best to keep column width in the approximate range of 10-20 words per line.