Easy HTML for eBay

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Introduction to

Easy HTML for eBay

Are you one of the millions who’ve discovered eBay? Do you pour through listings

looking for that one piece of treasure? Or do you have a pile of treasures you’ve

pulled out of your attic to sell? Maybe you’ve decided to make eBay the storefront for

your new business. If so, you’ve probably discovered something: You have to make

your listings look good.

But there’s a problem. Maybe you’d be perfectly capable of creating a beautiful list-

ing as long as you could use a paper and pencil, but the idea of designing some-

thing that will appear on the World Wide Web has got you stuck. After all, this isn’t

like a Word processor, where you can just type and drag items around on the page.

No, if you’re going to take full advantage of the capabilities at hand, you need to

know how to write Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language your browser

understands.

This book takes you by the hand and explains how to use HTML in your listings,

About Me page, and eBay Store. You’ll start with the basics such as paragraphs and

lists, which you can also accomplish using eBay’s editors. Then you’ll move on to

more advanced HTML, such as adding images to your description and controlling its

layout and appearance, which is well beyond what you can do with eBay’s editors.

Later in the book, I’ll show you how to notch up the “cool factor” for your listings

with special effects. And all along the way, I’ll try to provide you with some tips for

making sure your listings don’t go from looking professional to looking overdone and

amateurish.

This book has 10 parts:

Part 1, “Creating an Auction Listing,” starts by showing you what things look like for

a buyer and then takes you through the process of actually adding a simple listing.

Part 2, “Creating a Simple Description,” gives you practice in using the basic HTML

elements such as headings, paragraphs, and horizontal rules.

Part 3, “Adding Pictures,” talks about one of the most important aspects of your list-

ing: the photo. It shows you some techniques for getting good photos of your items

and explains how to make the photos you take available on eBay as part of your

description.

Part 4, “Arranging the Page,” shows you how to use tables and divisions to control

the layout and placement of items in your description.

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Part 5, “Decorating the Page,” uses borders, background colors, and background

images to liven up the display of your page.

Part 6, “Styling the Text,” explains how stylesheets work and shows you how you can

control just about every aspect of your text’s appearance.

Part 7, “Creating Links,” demonstrates the types of links that are, indeed, permitted

under eBay’s rules, such as one that automatically creates an email with the auction

number in the subject.

Part 8, “Adding Sound, Video, and Animation,” teaches you how to take things one

step further and create and add sound, video, and animations to your page. (Subtly,

I hope!)

Part 9, “About Me Pages and eBay Stores,” starts by explaining how to create your

own About Me page and customize it using eBay’s custom tags. It also explains how

to create your own store and perform the limited customization that eBay allows

there.

Part 10, “Making Your Listings Stand Out,” is a catchall chapter, filled with tech-

niques for enhancing your listing.

Throughout the book, I’ve used Microsoft Internet Explorer because at the time of this

writing it’s more commonly used, but these techniques have been tested to work in

other common browsers such as Netscape and its derivatives.

This book should teach you what you need to know, but eBay is an ever-changing

place. As I write this, eBay is restructuring how it displays descriptions. So if you still

have questions, or if you just want to check in to see what’s new, I’ll be maintaining

a section for this book on my website at http://www.nicholaschase.com/

easyhtmlforebay/.

All right, then, on to Part 1!