Create an eBay Listing with SeaMonkey Composer

By Marsha Collier from eBay Business All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

SeaMonkey Composer, which you can download from the SeaMonkey home page, offers many features for creating an attractive HTML template for your eBay listings. The most important features in the Composer interface are the four tabs at the bottom of the screen. These tabs enable you to view your template in several ways:

Normal. This is your standard design mode, where you can highlight text — change it or color it — and add pictures or tables, as shown below.

It takes just a few seconds to put together a simple template in Normal view.
HTML Tags. This view shows you your template with the symbols of the tags you have created.

It’s easy to learn HTML when the tags are spelled out for you.
HTML Source. The following figure shows the raw HTML code that you see when you click the Source tab. From this view, you can save the template to your hard drive and change the text and tags directly in the HTML.

Just copy and paste this source code into the eBay Sell an Item form, and voila!
Preview. This tab displays your work pretty much the same as the Normal setting, but it's good to double check that everything is perfect before you save it.

In the following steps, you create a table that contains a photo on the left and text on the right:

Click the Table button on the toolbar or choose Tools→Insert Table.

An Insert Table screen appears.
If you want a photo next to your text, indicate 1 row with 2 columns, as shown here.

Creating a table with two cells.

This creates a table with two cells side-by-side.
Click OK.

The table palette disappears, and you see the table or the HTML coding for two cells on the screen.

Coding for a 2 x 1 table in the SeaMonkey screen.
Click Row 1 Cell 1 on the screen, and then click the Image button on the toolbar.

In Source mode, this would be between the HTML opening and closing codes (<td> and </td>). The Image button looks like a little picture. The Image Tag dialog box appears.
In the Image Properties box, type the Internet address (URL) where your image is stored.

You can get the URL from your image hosting service or Web site or by locating the image on the Internet and copying the URL from the top of your browser. If you want to alter the size of your image, you can also type the width or height (or both), in pixels, in the Dimensions boxes.
Click OK.

The HTML code for the image appears inside the text area.
Click Row 1 Cell 2 on your screen and enter the description text you want to appear next to the picture.

For convenience, you can also open an auction description you’ve already written in Windows Notepad and copy and paste it into the space.
When your listing is finished, click Publish to upload the information to eBay and start your auction!