Auction Templates

HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language.  It is used to format text for the web.  This article’s intended audience is the typical online auction seller.  Many sellers find themselves wanting to “dress up” their auction listings in an attempt to attract higher bids and maintain a more professional appearance.  If you have reached this article and find that you want to achieve these same results, but don’t want to be bothered with learning HTML, then I would strongly suggest making use of a site like BiggerBids.com.  BiggerBids.com is an eBay auction templates service that can automate everything for you.  In case you haven’t guessed – yes, we do own BiggerBids.

Line breaks
There are many ways to achieve a breaking line using HTML.  The most common one is with the use of a <br> tag.  The <br> tag creates a single line break wherever it is placed.  If you want to start a new line, simply include the <br> tag where you would generally use your ‘enter’ (or ‘return’ for Mac users) key.  If you want to break over 2 lines, simply use <br><br>.  There is no limit to the number of <br> tags you can use at once.

Opening and closing
The<br> tag is one of the few HTML tags that does not require a closing tag.  Most of the other tags I will cover here require both an opening and closing tag.  All of the content you want to format using a particular tag should be placed within those opening and closing tags.  For instance, a <p> tag is used to place a block of text within its own paragraph.  It is used like this:

<p>This text appears in its own paragraph.</p>
<p>This text appears as its own paragraph below the above paragraph.</p>

The above HTML codes translate to:

This text appears in its own paragraph.

This text appears as its own paragraph below the above paragraph.

Some simple formatting
<b>Bold</b> text = Bold text
<u>Underlined</u> text = Underlined text
<i>Italicized</i> text = Italicized text

Nested tags
Because you may want to apply more than one piece of formatting to a particular text block, you can also place tags within one another.  This can be tricky for new users, because you need to make sure that both the opening and closing tags for one are within the opening and closing tags of another.

This is not correct:

This is <b><u>bold and underlined</b></u> text.

This is correct:

This is <b><u>bold and underlined</u></b> text.

Notice how the correct version shows the underline tags placed completely within the bold tags.  This seems simple, but is very important.

Tags with attributes
So far we have seen some simple HTML tags used to format the text they are wrapped around.  The HTML language also offers you the ability to further customize how a particular tag behaves using HTML tag attributes.  Let’s explore the <font> tag to learn more about this.  The <font> tag allows you to do control a number of display variations for the text it is wrapped around.  The three most used attributes are ‘color,’ ‘face’ and ‘size.’

HTML tag attributes are placed within the opening tag.  They follow this format:

<tagname attributename=”attributevalue”>text to format goes here</tagname>

Let’s explore the three font attributes by using this format:

This is <font color=”#FF0000”>red</font> text.
This is also <font color=”red”>red</font> text.

Notice how the color attribute can be used in two different ways.  You can either assign a color by name or by it Hexadecimal value.

We are using an <font face=”Arial”>Arial font</font> to display this text.
We are using a <font face=”Times New Roman”> Times New Roman font</font> to display this text.

By using the face attribute you can control the actual font that is used to render the text on the screen.

This is <font size=”7”>very large</font> text.
This is <font size=”1”>very small</font> text.

The size attribute allows us to control how large the text will appear on screen.  The allowable values here are from one (1) to seven (7), with seven being the largest.

Combining attributes within one tag
Ad finally we can also combine multiple attributes within the same opening tag.  For instance:

This is <font size=”7” color=”red” face=”Arial”>very large, red text that appears in an Arial font</font> on the user’s screen.

Hyper linking
You can also make use of the <a> tag to hyper link to another web page.  There are two main attributes to be aware of here – ‘href’ and ‘target.’  Let’s look at the following example:

<a href=”http://www.ebay.com” target=”_blank”>Click here</a> to visit the eBay home page.

In this example the words ‘Click here’ will become a hyper link.  When clicked, a new browser window will open and it will go to the eBay home page.  It is the href attribute that you use to point to the proper link location.  The target attribute can be completely omitted if you want to direct the user straight to the linked page without opening a new window like this:

<a href=”http://www.ebay.com” >Click here</a> to visit the eBay home page.

Displaying an image
All auction sellers need to place images in their auctions… right?  Well, this can be one of the more tricky things to do with HTML.  Although placing the image is quite simple, it can be a challenge to get it to render in the proper place on your screen.  I suggest taking the following example along with you on your quest to dig deeper into the HTML language.

An image is displayed using the ‘img’ tag coupled with the ‘src’ attribute.  There are also many other attributes that can be used within the img tag, but again, that’s for your own further exploration.  As a side note, the img tag is another that does not require a closing tag.  You simply place it wherever you want your image to render.

<img src=”http://pics.ebaystatic.com/aw/pics/logos/logoEbay_150×70.gif”>

At the time of this writing, the above tag will display the eBay logo.  The value of the src attribute should be the url of the image you want to display.

That wraps up this (very introductory) article on HTML for auction sellers.  To continue reading, may I suggest clicking on one of the related tags below?