eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Frame Your Listings

Use tables and carefully aligned images to place decorative frames around your auction descriptions.

A little extra decoration will give your customers that warm, fuzzy feeling they need to open their wallets and bid a little higher, or so the theory goes. At the very least, frames may help your auctions look more polished and inviting.

Tip

For a fee, eBay’s Listing Designer upgrade [Hack #46] will do this for you. But using the predesigned templates everyone else uses is not exactly the best way to make your listings look unique. Instead, take a few minutes to design your own and save the fees for buying more stuff on eBay.

The Table

It all starts with a single table, which positions the frame across the top, bottom, and sides, holding your content snugly inside. While you’re designing the table, turn on the border by placing border=1 in the <table> tag so you can see more clearly what’s going on.

    <table style="width:100%" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=1>
    <tr>
      <td width=25>top-left</td>
      <td>top-middle</td>
      <td width=25>top-right</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td width=25>left side</td>
      <td>

    Your content goes here...

    <br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>

      </td>
      <td width=25>right side</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td width=25>bottom-left</td>
      <td width=25>bottom-middle</td>
      <td width=25>bottom-right</td>
    </tr>
    </table>

The resulting table shown in Figure 4-13 is a placeholder for the eventual design. Note the width=25 parameters in the left-and righthand columns, which can be changed to ...