Good afternoon and welcome to the fifth and last of the PowerSeller Pointer Workshops. Last week's was on Advanced Shops and can be reviewed here.
The pinks, here at eBay UK, were approached by a group of PowerSellers who asked if they could use the Workshop Boards to host a series of workshops around the theme of good eBay practices for businesses on eBay. Individually they are PowerSellers who have each enjoyed (through tremendous hard work and skill) business success on eBay but collectively they want to share with you some of the pointers they picked up along the way, so who were we to say no to such a kind and thoughtful offer?
Today’s is on HTML for Absolute Beginners and will be led by biddybidbidbid.
She has asked that people DO NOT post or test HTML codes during this workshop. We would like to maintain as clean a workshop as possible. Please use the remainder of the HTML board for that.
Feel free to ask questions as the workshop runs but please be mindful of the fact that our host will be doing her best to address many issues at the same time – such is the quick fire nature of forums!
Us pinks will also tag along for the ride and will be happy to do our best to field questions that perhaps our Pointers cannot. Finally we’d also ask you to respect the considerable time and effort that these sellers have put in. Their enthusiasm for eBay and the how to unlock the potential of the site knows no bounds and I would certainly like to start by thanking them for their efforts.
My name's Sue (eBay ID: biddybidbidbid). I'm a Powerseller, I've been selling on eBay since 2000, full time for the last two years. I wrote my first web site eleven years ago, and my first commercial site six years ago. As well as two eBay shops, I maintain several personal and commercial sites at the moment.
In this webinar, we'll look at some of the elements that make up a good listing, and the ways they can be put together effectively. I don't assume you have any prior knowledge of HTML at all. I won't be showing you how to create a full-blown website, or even everything that HTML can do, but some easy things you can learn to help your listings stand out. We'll be covering the following areas:
What HTML is, and why you need to know it
Formatting text:
Bold, italic and underlining
Line breaks
Controlling text colour and size
Non-keyboard characters
Links
Pictures
Tables
Designing your listing
If you know absolutely no HTML at all, this might all be a lot to take in in one hit. I've begun with the easiest things to do, working through to more complex ideas, so you might find it easier to make yourself thoroughly familiar with one section before you tackle the next.
HTML (it stands for "Hyper-Text Markup Language", though you don't need to remember that!) is simply a set of instructions that tell your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, AOL, etc.) how to display words and pictures. It isn't "computer programming" and if you get it wrong, all you'll get is a funny-looking web page. You can't blow up your computer, destroy eBay or close down the internet with HTML: in other words, it's nothing to be afraid of.
Why learn HTML?
Why bother learning something new when eBay provide you with listing templates and a listing designer? With just a little work, you can make your listings look completely different from everyone elses. Rather than your auctions looking the same as your competition's, you can have your own logos, your own colour scheme, and a layout that's designed specifically for the items you sell. You can have consistent branding across your auction listings, eBay Shop pages and email marketing: in fact, you can make your presence on eBay unique!
In this section, we'll take a look at our first HTML tags and learn some very easy ways to control the appearance of text in your listings. "Tag", by the way, simply means one small piece of HTML code: <b> for example.
Bold and Italic
For our first HTML tags, lets suppose you want some words to stand out as important in your auction listing: you could make the text bold or italic.
To make the text bold, all you do is type <b> at the beginning of the bold text, and </b> when you want the bold to stop. The pointy brackets are the ones on the second-to-bottom row of your keyboard, just to the right of "m".
<b>here is some bold text</b> will give you here is some bold text
Italics works in the same way: <i>here is some italic text</i> will give you here is some italic text
Notice how these tags come in pairs, an opening one and a closing one: remember to put in the closing tag, or the text will be changed for the rest of the listing!
Most HTML tags do make sense if you remember what they stand for. B for bold, I for italic. Next, let's see what U stands for.
The underline tag is another nice simple one: <u>here is some underlined text</u> gives you here is some underlined text
Though underlining can sometimes be useful, be careful where you use it. On the internet, underlined usually indicates a link: if you underline text that isn't a link, you can confuse your buyers.
We've all seen auctions where the text is in one huge block, with the item description, postage, payment methods and terms and conditions all running into each other in a big, illegible block. I can't be bothered to read them, and I'm sure most buyers would feel the same. Putting in line breaks is one of the simplest things you can do, but can make the biggest difference to how legible your auction is.
The tag for this is also very simple: <br> will give you one line break... just like that! And if you want a gap between the two lines, all you need to do is put two <br> tags in...
There are several ways to change the size and colour of your text. I will show you the easiest one here.
The <font> tag is a very versatile tag. It can change the colour, the size or both of your text. For example: <font size="+2">Here's some big text</font> will give you Here's some big text The number after the "size" attribute tells the browser, 'make this text two sizes larger than normal'. If you want to, you can also make the text smaller: <font size="-2">Here's some small text</font> will give you Here's some small text
Notice how there's a pair of double quotes in that tag. Make sure you include both the opening and closing quote marks, otherwise your code will not work as you expect it to.
In the same way, you can change the colour of your text: <font color="red">Here is some red text</font> will give you Here is some red text (Note the American spelling of color.)
There are sixteen different colour names you can safely use with the font tag: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow. And if none of those is quite right, you can even specify the exact mix of the red, green and blue primary colours with the hash sign followed by a six digit code like this: <font color="#ff00ff">here is some bright pink text</font> will give you here is some bright pink text If you want, you can see a list of codes and the colours they represent at http://webmonkey.com/webmonkey/reference/color_codes/.
bookworm_rascal What I want to know is how to get the codes for the colours for HTML. Hope that link helps you. Some graphics programs can also be set to give these hexadecimal codes for colours. For example, if you use Paintshop Pro, under File > Preferences > General Programme Preference > Palettes, you can select hexadecimal colours there, and set it to always display them. I find that very helpful for making sure that graphics and other page elements such as text match each other.
And to be honest, as you practise more, you'll start to find that you can guess pretty close to the colour you want anyway.
Be careful when choosing colours. The easiest text to read is dark text on a light background. Light text on a dark background can be effective, but might need to be larger, bolder or both to be readable. Notice in the paragraph above how "yellow" is difficult to read against a white background. Dark text on a dark background is going to be illegible for almost everyone: a very bad idea! (We'll look at setting background colours in a minute.)
Changes in font sizes, too, should be used carefully. Auctions that use huge text all the way through are just as illegible as those that use tiny little writing.
I'm sitting here watching, can't think of any questions because I know nothing about html, but will bookmark this thread as I have the book keeping one. These worshops will stay here for future reference wont they?
Donna, yes, this thread and all the other webinars will remain; as the others have, it'll be moved to the workshops board after this afternoon, but it will certainly be available for future reference.
tryac1 Is there a set sequence for putting several instructions together - eg. underlined double sized blue text?
That's an excellent question
There isn't a set sequence. However, you should close the tags in the opposite order to how you opened them: so if you have bold and italic, <b><i>bold italic text</i></b>
Sometimes in your listings, you'll want to use characters that aren't part of the normal keyboard set of symbols: for example, the copyright sign, the Euro symbol or fractions. This section looks briefly at how to use these characters.
€ € ® ® ½ ½ ¼ ¼ ¾ ¾ If you ever list in languages other than English, you might find the following examples useful: á á è è ç ç ö ö
This gives you a brief overview of some special characters. If you'd like to see what further characters are available, Google for "html entities": there are hundreds!
In this section, we've learned how to make text bold, italic or underlined, how to put in line breaks and non-keyboard characters, and how to change the colour and size of text. We've also seen that there are good ways to use HTML, and some ways which are not so good.
pets_express - I do understand it but it's remembering wot to do I have the problem with!
It's easier to remember once you realise the HTML tags mean something, eg <B7gt; for Bold, <i> for italic etc The more you use HTML the easier it becomes
In this section, we'll learn how to create clickable text that links to another web page: for example, to your eBay Shop front. Here's what a link tag looks like: <a href="URL">LINK TEXT</a>
The text, of course, can be anything you like. The URL can be a link to your shop home page or perhaps better, to specific shop categories relevant to your listed item: just click on the relevent category in your shop, and then copy the entire address bar into your link tag. If you're selling electronic goods, a link that says "buy the batteries to go with this item" and links directly to the relevent shop listing, might be just what your customer is looking for!
Krythy What's the difference between a paragraph and a line break?
*Briefly*, <br> will give you one new line, and the paragraph tag <p> will give you two, as if you'd put in two br tags. (Where you might want to use one rather than the other is a little more complex than the absolute beginners standard we're aiming for today.)
qersoft When inserting a hyperlink to a page in my my Ebay shop, I copy the URL for the path. However, there seems to be a lot of superfluous letters at the end of the URL that dont appear to have any effect. Should I include these in the URL or not? eg http://stores.ebay.co.uk/mystore_catagoryA_W0QQcolZ4QQdirZ1QQfsubZ17QQftidZ2QQtZkm
Most of the time, the superfluous letters are for tracking where your visitors come from, so can be safely missed out. However, if you're linking to a subcategory of your shop and miss the encoded information from the end, you break the link, and it goes to the front page of your shop instead of the subcategory. So do check the link goes where you want it to, before you pass it on to a potential customer!
In this section, we'll look at putting pictures into your listings, why eBay's picture hosting isn't necessarily the best solution for you, and how you can have multiple images on your auctions without paying the earth for them.
Why not just use eBay picture hosting?
eBay's picture hosting offers you one free picture on every listing. While for some items, this can be enough, often it's not. Close-ups of jewellery, back views of clothing, the interior of a car: all of these can mean higher bids or quicker buy it nows. If you have a Gallery picture on your item, you can probably find a better way to use that feature than a shrunk-down version of the big picture. If you host your own pictures rather than leaving it to eBay, you can have as many pictures as you like for very little money, and perhaps for free!
Scarletogrady * I just copied post #34 in my group for future reference - but of course it just posted the symbols and not the code!... how did you do that
Heh heh If you want to make the code appear rather than the symbol, you have to use the code for the & symbol, which is &
So to make € appear on the screen, you have to type &euro;
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