Feel you must add images to spice up your post? Not always a good idea.

Again, another rant, playing Devils advocate, it’s all the same, I’m just moaning.

We hear a lot (I do in any case) about using images to make your post more appealing. These are some of the top suggestions leveled at us as a ‘must do’, ’should do’, ‘ought to’, ‘have to’ by a lot of bloggers who apparently know what is best. That to not spice up your post with images is a instant turn off and that some people actually don’t even bother to read a post if there is no apparent image or cool graphic. This simply is just a little ’shallow’.

So a writer doesn’t or can’t add images to his post. Does not make it any less valuable. Maybe he/she can’t add images for whatever reason? Their knowledge of the software or application is limited?

The upshot of all this advice from the so called ‘top bloggers’ is that posts are now being littered with awful images, low resolution, jaggy, blurry, tacky or unrelated images. This is more of a turn off me that having no images at all. I see so many darn awful images now littered all over sites and posts with seemingly no regard for placement, content or quality just so they have that ‘oh so important’ image on their post.

What’s so wrong with plain old text. What’s wrong with relying on words and information? If the message is in there, then surely that’s what counts. If there is no image maybe it’s because the writer does not want to litter or crowd the page. Maybe they don’t have access to quality images, maybe they don’t know how to place the images nicely to ensure they flow with the article.

There is also the important point that adding unrelated images, or ‘crap quality’ images actually cam make a post look far worse than a post without images. In my opinion anyway.