Be forewarned, I am not an expert … more of an obsessed hack … there are many others on this forum who you should probably be taking advice from … that said:
I put Voxengo’s Voxformer (a vocal strip containing EQ, Compression, gating, de-essing, etc.) on the vocal track in the effect’s bin and use that as a starting point to get the vocal to sit in the mix.
Voxengo’s products are nice for many reasons and wrt Voxformer (a lot like Ozone) you can really use their presets as learning tools and possibly starting points for tweaking the various parameters (but please don’t tell anybody I said that, especially Bitflipper … it will just piss him off).
From there I experiment with reverb, delay and chorus either in the effects bin of the track itself or as a buss (probably just stating the obvious).
But, I did recently start fooling around with an old-school delay technique that I really like:
With the lead vocal right down the middle, I insert 2 sends on the mono vocal track and set up 2 stereo buss’s panning them hard left and right. I then insert a mono tape delay (the tape delay in Line 6’s guitar pod) in the effects bin of each buss. I set the delay panned hard left to a 1/4 note delay and the delay panned hard right to an 1/8 note delay (e.g., 429 microsecond and 214 microseconds respectively for a tune at 140 bpm) and very subtly bring them into the mix. I am finding that it really creates a nice/interesting stereo image (if that’s the right term) for something panned down the middle.