How to blog effectively: Insert relevant images
The general public is one of the audiences for your civic blog and the media culture they live in is heavily visual. If your blog is 99% text, you're likely to have trouble getting them to be regular visitors to your site. Print-based newspapers, newsletter, and magazines all have a long history of using page-design, headlines and graphics to draw the attention of readers' eyes and to make it easier for them to read once they start reading. Weblogs' simple format tends to encourage a blog author to just write and post, without giving much thought to visual appeal.
The content and writing style of a text-heavy post might be compelling enough to engage the reader all the way through. But more often that not, a civic leader doesn't have the time or talent to make most of their public policy posts compelling enough for the average citizen to at least be tempted to give it a glimpse. So it's helpful to use freely available images on the internet to both give the reader a visual cue as to what the post is about, and to break up the text/paragraphs so that the post isn't so overwhelming.
Most likely candidates for images are:
- The logos and banners of organisations that you're mentioning in your blog post.
- Clip art
- Images that help explain the content, such as maps and diagrams