Cutting a design up into eight 2K images will help a page load faster than leaving it as one 20K image, (16K < 20K) right? Not really. Each HTTP request generates about 1K of server-client traffic overhead, so eight 2K images with HTTP headers creates about 24K of traffic, where one 20K image creates only 21K. Not the most dramatic example but some site layouts are made from 30 or more image files not counting content or advertising images, slowing down load times significantly.
Oh sure, Verdana and Times get a little old, but the beauty of HTML is it's searchability, search engines parse the text of a page that (hopefully) brings users. Locking column headers, quotes, image descriptions or any text in GIFs or JPEGs makes it invisible to the indexing that search engines do. Time spent designing and updating text images is time spent working against the goal of delivering web content.
Many print design ideas fail miserably on the web, but the fundamental organizational rules still hold: the most important piece of information should have the most visual impact, the second should fall behind that and so on. Giving users too many options on every page inhibits the process of the user finding what they're looking for.
Create a text link to each of the pages of your blog. Google will not follow links in image maps, and will never find script-delivered content ( i.e. /myblog.cgi?day=23&month=september&year=2006) without being sent there explicitly. Maintaining a site map is a good way to accomplish this. Not moving these links every time you archive old content or re-design your site is likewise imperative to building up repeat traffic.
Links turn purple when you click on them, that way you can tell where you've been. Spending a ton of time and effort creating a graphic navigation aid is noble, but if you'd just let your text link colors behave like the W3 intended, maybe you'd have more time for other things. Like drinking, sneezing or being patient with children, you know, the good stuff.
Ideally you should be able to re-design your whole site right from the CSS file and never touch one page of HTML. Sometimes it makes sense to link a secondary stylesheet for a one-off page, but an inline style declaration will never outlive the relevance of the content it's supporting.
Know your tags! A lot of the existing HTML tags were intended for pretty specific contexts, but all it takes is a little creativity and some CSS reformatting to get milage out of these. The
<big> <blockquote> <code> <cite>
<del> <em> <ins> <kbd> <q> <samp>
<small> <src> <strong> <tt> <var>
