Beginners Information
If you are interested in using a template to dress up your auction pages but have never used one before, you may read some terms you are unfamiliar with. While there's more than one way to do any given thing, I will tell you how I do them.
1. -
Copy and paste
To hi-light a string of words - Press and hold down the left mouse button and drag the cursor across the desired text to hi-light it
To copy the hi-lighted text - On your keyboard press the keys, ctrl + c. This will save the text to the clipboard.
To paste your copied text - Position the cursor where you want to paste your copied text. On the keyboard, press the keys ctrl + v. This will paste the text that has been saved to the clipboard.
2. -
Comment Tag
Web page and template designers often place comment tags throughout their HTML code. The comment tags purpose is to pass along information to those reading the code. When a browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.) reads the HTML code to display a web page it will bypass the comment tag so the info contained in the comment tag will not show when a webpage loads in a browser window. All my templates contain instructional comment tags to make it easy for a template user to locate the places where they will need to type in their descriptions, add their picture URL and other auction related information. A simple comment tag looks like this:
To make a comment tag stand out more I will also make them like:
3. -
Photo Host
A place to store your pictures on the internet.
To insert as many pictures in your auction as you need, without paying the extra fees for this service, then you need to store the pictures somewhere on the internet. Some Internet Service Providers offer their customers some FTP space that can be used for hosting your own pictures/files. Some ISPs only offer a few megabytes of storage space,so the next best thing is to look for a website geared to this service. One very popular photo host is Photobucket.com. They offerfree accounts as well as paid accounts. There are a number of photo hosts that offer free and pay for services.
4. -
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
In the popular usage a URL is a web address where a website or image is located on the internet. A URL typically looks something like this: http://www.google.com
You'll find the URL your browser is pointing to up in the address field.
5. -
Image Tag
Looks like:
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When you have the URL for your auction picture you will be pasting it within the image tag in your template code so it looks something like this:
<img src="http://YourURL.com" alt="image name" width="150" height="150">
You can fill in the height="" and width="" with the pixel dimensions of your own image. Doing this will keep the browser window from jumping around each time a new image loads up. If you prefer not to bother with them then delete them completely because they can't be left empty or at 0.
6. -
NotePad
A plain text editor built into windows. You don't have to use just notepad. Any text editor should do, preferably one that supports syntax high-lighting.
