Our eBay store
My seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
Our online store at Yahoo
Our eBay
store
My seller's
profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.
Many Internet service providers, including America Online, offer their dial-in customers free or low-cost Web space. And Web hosting companies like Xoom, AngelFire, Tripod, and Geocities offer free space. You can create your pages on your own PC or Mac and upload them to the service provider or Web-hosting site, where they are made available for anyone anywhere in the world to visit any time they want. The details of how to upload and where to put your pages vary. Check the help files or ask the support staff at your Internet provider or Web-hosting site to help step you through it the first time.
There are many ways to build Web pages. This article provides a few quick tips on what you can do and how, using a simple non-technical approach. Basically, if you can create a document in Microsoft Word, you can create Web pages.
If you use Word for Office 95, there is a free software patch -- the "Internet Assistant for Word," which can turn that word processing program into a simple and powerful Web-page authoring tool. Microsoft used to make the patch available at their site; but now they are pushing Office 97 and they have stopped giving out the patch for 95. You can, however, still find it at many other Web sites. Go to AltaVista (www.altavista.com ) and search for wdia204z.exe Pick the version that is right for your particular hardware and operating system, and follow the instructions for downloading and installing.
You can also use Word for Office 97. Either way, Word will handle HTML (hypertext markup language) as just another file format or template. You can use it to convert an existing Word document to HTML, by using the "Save As" command and choosing HTML. Or you can use it to create new documents in HTML.
Start a new document. In 95, under File, select Templates, then click on Attach, and from the selections shown, highlight "Html.dot" and click on OK, then OK again. In 97, under "File" click on New, then on the "Web Pages" tab, then select Blank Web Page
You should now see new icons in your toolbars. (If you don't normally use the toolbars, click on View and then Toolbars, and select "Standard" and "Formatting" and then click on "OK.") These icons open up functions you need to create Web pages.
In particular, click on the icon with a chain link in it to add a hyperlink to your page, and click on the picture with the image of a mountain to add a picture.
For an auction sales page, what matters is text -- clear and helpful writing -- not graphics and design. The pictures of the items you have for sale should all be accessible with your item descriptions at the auction site. Here you want to provide useful information about yourself, your auction selling activities, and the kinds of things that you sell. The more text you can provide the better, because search engines only index text, and that's how you want potential buyers to find you.
The most important parts of your page, from the perspective of being found by search engines are the HTML title and the first few lines of text. The HTML title is not the name of the file, and not the headline in large type, but rather words that appear in a special position in the header of your page. Search engines like AltaVista give high priority to the words in the HTML title when determining which pages will appear near the top of lists of matches. And those are also the words that appear in such a list as the name of the page.
Don't let the alphabet soup of HTML confuse you. This is very easy to do. In 95, first click on the icon that looks like the letter "i" on a sheet of paper. A box opens up for you to enter the title of your page. In 97, click on File, then Properties, and enter the title there.
Now enter your content, just as you would any other new document. If you'd prefer to start with something you wrote before, open that other document, then under Edit, choose Select All, and Copy; then exit that document, and Paste the contents into your new document.
To enhance the looks of your content, in 95, click on Format, then on Style, and in the bottom left-hand corner, under List, click on the down arrow and select All Styles. Use the scroll bar to see the full range of choices. In 97, click Format, then Style, and you'll see all the choices right away. Either way, to change the Style of a piece of text in your document, you highlight that piece of text, then go to this set of Style choices, select the one you want, and click on Apply. Experiment to see the range of choices. First select styles for your head and subheads.
The usual methods for highlighting text in Word apply here as well. For instance you can change words to bold or italics or underline just as you would normally. If you have lists, you may want to bullet or number them. You can do this by highlighting the text and choosing a particular style, or by simply using the numbered list and bulleted list icons from the toolbar, as you would normally.
To divide your text into sections, position the cursor where you want the divider, click, and then click on the dark horizontal line in the toolbar.
To add a hypertext link to another Web page, highlight the words in your text that you want associated with the link, then click on the chain in the toolbar and enter the URL (Web address that you want to link to). For instance, you might want to copy and paste here the URLs for your current auction items or your feedback pages or your About Me pages at auction sites.
If you are going to have more than one Web page, make sure that you have hyperlinks connecting them so readers can easily move from one to another and can always, from any of your pages, return to your preferred starting point or index page.
To add a hypertext link to an email address, simply enter under "File or URL" mailto:username@address, e.g., mailto:seltzer@samizdat.com
If you have a long document, there is no need to divide it up into lots of smaller documents with links among them (which many people do). Keep it simple -- both for your own convenience and the convenience of readers. The fewer the documents the better. If they consist of text, with no graphics, they should download quickly.
If you have a picture of some other graphic element which you would like to use, click on the place in the document where you would like it to appear, then click on the icon showing mountains and Browse to locate and enter the file you want.
When you have finished your page, save it with a name that ends with the suffix ".htm" and as type "HTML document." Then upload it to the site of your service provider or Web host. If you have links to pictures, be sure to upload them to the same directory.
Next week we'll provide tips on submitting your pages to search engines and publicizing them for free over the Internet.
Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
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Buy Richard's book Web Business Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
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