Easy HTML for eBay

by Nicholas Chase

Overview

eBay sellers, like yourself, understand that creating a professional looking auction page and a professional looking "me" page is key to your business. You are constantly looking for new tips and tricks that will help you deliver a more powerful, effective ad. With competition growing you need to use HTML to pull in prospective buyers. Easy HTML for eBay was developed with input from eBay Power Sellers and provides the foundation that you need and want to make the most of your business, including information on:

• Creating an Auction Listing
• Creating a Simple Description
• Adding Pictures
• Arranging the Page
• Decorating the Page
• Styling the Text
• Creating Links
• Adding Sound, Video, and Animation
• About Me Pages and eBay Stores
• Making Your Listings Stand Out

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780132713672
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	12/13/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nicholas Chase has been involved in website development for companies such as Lucent Technologies, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Nick has been a high school physics teacher, a low-level radioactive waste facility manager, an online science-fiction magazine editor, a multimedia engineer, an Oracle instructor, and the chief technology officer of an interactive communications firm. He has written more than 100 tutorials and articles for IBM's developerWorks and serves as InformIT.com's XML and web services reference guide. He is the author of several books on XML and web development, including XML Primer Plus (published by Sams Publishing). He's currently trying to buy a farm so he and his wife can raise alpacas and mutant chickens. He loves to hear from readers and can be reached at [e-mail].

Read an Excerpt

Introduction to Easy HTML for eBayIntroduction 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 listing as long as you could use a paper and pencil, but the idea of designing something 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 andamateurish.

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 listing: 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.

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 techniques 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!

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Introduction.

1. Creating an Auction Listing.

    What the Buyer Sees: Browsing Categories.

    Registering As a Seller.

    Creating an Auction.

    Editing an Auction.

    Choosing a Theme.

    Choosing a Layout.

2. Creating a Simple Description.

    Writing and Previewing Your Description.

    Creating a Heading.

    Using Line Breaks.

    Creating Paragraphs.

    Creating Separator Lines.

    Basic Text Formatting.

3. Adding Pictures.

    Setting Up for Photos.

    Taking the Picture.

    Saving the Picture.

    Removing Extra Background.

    Straightening the Photo.

    Color-correcting the Photo.

    Removing Photo Backgrounds.

    Resizing the Photo.

    Balancing Image Quality and File Size: JPEG Files.

    Uploading Pictures to eBay.

    Adding Images to Your Description.

    Adding Watermarks to Your Images.

4. Arranging the Page.

    Creating a Table of Text.

    Arranging Images with a Table.

    Using Irregular Tables.

    Framing the Description.

    Nesting Tables.

    Wrapping Text Around Images.

    Creating a Section on the Page.

    Aligning Objects to the Left or Right.

    Placing Objects in a Specific Location.

5. Decorating the Page.

    Adding Borders to a Table.

    Adding Borders to Part of a Table.

    Setting Partial Borders.

    Using Border Styles.

    Adding Background Colors to Objects.

    Adding Background Images to Objects.

    Adding a Background Color to the Overall Description.

    Adding a Background Image to the Page.

    Creating a Tiling Background.

6. Styling the Text.

    Changing the Size of Your Text.

    Changing Text Colors.

    Changing the Typeface.

    Allowing for Missing Fonts.

    Using a Span to Style Specific Text.

    Using Strikethrough.

    Adding an Underline.

    Controlling the Space Between Letters.

    Controlling the Space Between Lines.

    Changing the Text Background.

    Using a Bulleted List.

    Using a Numbered List.

    Adding Moving Text.

    Applying General Styles.

7. Creating Links.

    Creating a "Send Me Email" Link.

    Setting the Subject Line on an Email.

    Including the Auction Number in an Email Link Automatically.

    Linking to More Information.

    Opening a New Window.

    Cross-promoting with Images.

    Controlling the Link Appearance.

    Linking to Your Other Auctions.

8. Adding Sound, Video, and Animation.

    Creating a Sound Recording.

    Creating a Sound File from a CD.

    Linking to a Sound.

    Embedding Sound in the Page.

    Adding Video.

    Using Animated (Flipbook) Images.

    Creating a Flash Image.

    Adding Flash to the Page.

9. About Me Pages and eBay Stores.

    Creating an About Me Page.

    Editing About Me HTML.

    Adding Your User Information to Your About Me Page.

    Adding and Grouping Your Items.

    Adding Your Feedback.

    Creating a New Store.

    Customizing the Store Theme with HTML.

    Creating a Custom HTML Store Page.

10. Making Your Listings Stand Out.

    Enabling Users to Search Your Other Auctions.

    Using Click to Enlarge to Maximize Attention.

    Preloading Images.

    Mouseover Effects.

    Adding Your Own Counter or Other Enhancements.

Index.