Testing Your HTML Code

It's happened to all of us. You spend an hour or so designing a great-looking HTML template, but when you paste it into your eBay Describe Your Item page, it doesn't look the way you planned. Something is wrong with your code!

I won't go into the complex issue of debugging HTML code (that's for a dedicated HTML book!), but I will show you how to find out if your code works before you paste it into your eBay description. The key is to use an HTML practice boarda website that lets you paste in your HTML code and then displays the results of that code. If your code works, great; if not, it's time to do a little editing.

There are many practice boards on the web, including the aptly named Practice Board (www.practiceboard.com) and Zoicks HTML Practice Board (www.zoicks.com/practice.htm). But the one I really like is the auctionSupplies.com Practice Board (auctionsupplies.com/practice/ebay.shtml), shown in Figure 5.8. That's because this practice board not only shows you the results of your HTML code, it places those results within a mock eBay item listing, as shown in Figure 5.9. This way you'll know if your code interferes in any way with the display of the basic eBay listing page. It's a great approach, and (like all the other practice boards) totally free for you to use.

Figure 5.8. Test your HTML at the auctionSupplies.com Practice Board.

Figure 5.9. Displaying the results of your HTML codeswithin a mock eBay auction listing.

And I assume you'll giving one of these practice boards a bit of use, as we move toward designing all manner of HTML auction templates. We'll start in the next chapter, where you'll learn how to create a variety of text-based templatesusing the very same HTML codes you learned earlier in this chapter.