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You don't have to be a tech head to learn about HTML (hypertext markup language). By understanding just a few simple concepts and codes, you'll gain a basic understanding of the lingua franca of the Internet and be able to incorporate it into your auction listings and perhaps even your own Web page. Our tip on learning HTML should get you started.

Speaking the Language of the Web
HTML is the coding language that's used to create hypertext documents on the World Wide Web--basically all the Web pages that you bring up on your browser, including everything from Amazon.com and the eBay announcements page to Steve's Really Cool Jennifer Love Hewitt Fan Page. HTML looks similar to old-fashioned typesetting code, in which a block of text is surrounded with codes, or formatting commands, indicating how it should appear. When you access a URL on your Web browser, the browser interprets the HTML commands that are embedded in the page and uses them to format the page's text and graphic elements.

The appropriate HTML codes are indicated by tags--keywords enclosed in less than (<) and greater than (>) signs. Both the opening and closing tags use the same command letter or word; however, the closing tag must have an initial extra forward slash symbol (/). HTML commands cover several types of text formatting, such as bold and italic text, lists, headline fonts in various sizes, and so on. They also enable the inclusion of graphics (i.e., auction photos) and other nontext elements. In addition, HTML allows you to link a word or group of words to other pages on the Internet.

Tagging
Auction sellers will use HTML most often when listing auctions. To follow are some common HTML tags that you can use to spruce up and enhance your listings.

Bold, Italics, and Underlining: Say you're writing your auction description and you want to call attention to certain words or phrases. For example, if you want to bold "brand-new" in the phrase "brand-new PC game," the tagging would be like this:

brand-new PC game

The result: brand-new PC game.

The same goes for italics and underlining, except that the letters "i" and "u" are used for the tags: brand-new PC game would read brand-new PC game, and brand-new PC game would read brand-new PC game.

Paragraph and Line Breaks: A lot of auction descriptions consist of one long, rambling paragraph. But HTML allows you to break up the text into multiple paragraphs, thus making the description easier to read and digest. Separate text into paragraphs by using the tag. For example:

This is the end of this paragraph.

And this is the beginning of the second paragraph.

If you want to drop immediately to the next line, then use the tag like so:

This is the first line. 
And this is the second line.

Bullets and Centering: Bullets (<li>) are great for lists of items (features, system requirements, etc.) that you want to highlight visually. Here's an example (including the tags for paragraph and line breaks):

System requirements:

<li>Pentium-166 
<li>16MB RAM 
<li>60MB hard disk space 
</li>

Which will appear like this:

System requirements:
Pentium-166
16MB RAM
60MB hard disk space

To center text, the tag is <center>. So if you want to create a headline of sorts, here's a possibility:

<center>Own a First Edition Nabokov!</center>

Which would look like this:

Own a First Edition Nabokov!

(Note: You can also use HTML tags to increase the size and change the colors of your fonts. For a few examples, check out eBay's HTML page.)

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