Using E*ays auction format would help people migrate to Ebid, IMO...

[Bitsnpiercings]

Gothicina; Yes, I see where you're coming from. My ebid template has been slimmed down (I don't mean just width!) a lot - I had to check and re-check to make sure I had taken out all references to E*ay, along with the Auctiva scrolling gallery. Now I have a new ebid template, it should be fairly straightfoward to do my listings. I'm glad I use Dreamweaver now as I like WYSIWYG editors, I'm afraid I'm definately not clever enough to use notepad and pure HTML!!!

damian_steele; Sorry, I realised that after I posted. I had to re-jiggle my tables around on my template, so it wouldn't be a case of find-and-replace. I'm just going to manually re-do each product using my new template (renaming, then inserting title, pic and description) rather than trying to convert my old templates. Only another five hundred and something to go....

gazza; Firstly, many thanks for changing my user ID so quickly after my request today - WOW! I almost don't want you guys to change the width now... not after the thought of my having changed 580+ templates

Thanks so much guys for your comments, I will no doubt need some help again soon!

[techsp]

I can relate to the width problem. My ebay ads are 800 px or a little bit wider. They are also 2-column ads which makes summary changes a little bit dangerous. Next they have embedded pictures in column width, so I need to scale these to new column width and adjust the link. Then there are links to ebay custom pages and numerous other things that have to be changed.
Another problem is that most ebay users have their ads in Turbolister, all description html needs to be exported first to use bulk find & replace.
So in the end I rather like to do it by hand, too many surprises any other way! If you have to fix a lot later any time gained with a bulk approach is lost and then some.
And I don't use the ebid editor, too limited and very time consuming. I rather prefer to do all changes locally with a top flight editor. Then the resulting html gets copied into the ad, no waiting for ebid server response.

I did use ebays custom pages as a kind of super home page to tie all ads together in an organized way, complete with thumbnails. Served as landing page for click marketing, too.
Now these links get changed to point to the relevant subdirectory in the store, not quite as nice.

We are working on widening the auction page description.

Gazza

That will most likely be quite far into the future?

[lofty100e]

We are working on widening the auction page description.

Gazza

Gazza, Does that mean that auctions which are already running will have to be re-formatted, again?

I'm not happy with that idea, as it was a struggle just over a year ago when you changed them last time.

[donkeyote]

Lofty, you won't have to redo your auctions if the allowable auction width increases, it's rather like not having to breathe in if you put on a pair of trousers much too big for you. The only problem you have is when you put on a pair of trousers that are too small for you - then you have to breathe in...

The auction width problem should be easy to fix, and to be honest, it should never have happened in the first place - the design company should have made sure they allowed for a maximum width that was much bigger than the current 600px (or whatever it is).

As for Gothinica's comments, I don't agree. If people copy over their Ebay auctions without removing references to Ebay, that's up to them, but with the current narrow width we are forced to use, we have to redesign our auctions to fit here. Check out my auction - it's 100% CSS based, but I had to spend quite a while amending things to make it fit - i.e. if I want an 800px wide image (which I normally use) I can't have it. If I want a 500px wide image with a 300px wide text column beside it, I can't do it.

Most monitors sold nowadays are widescreen, and yet here is Ebid's auctions limiting us all to a tiny 600px.

It should be very easy to fix: somewhere in the Ebid code there is a width value that decides the width of the auction. This just needs to be increased. When the new site was first introduced, IIRC, there was a graphic which formed the top of the auctions, which had been designed as one piece, of a fixed width (by definition, as it was one image), and the rest of the auction page had been built around that. That image is no longer there, so expanding the width should be a five minute job for the web designers.

Having griped about that, the rest of the site is extremely professional looking, in my opinion, and the only improvements I can think of are that many of the borders of boxes, and dividing lines, need more contrast, so that they show up better against the background colours. (Otherwise, the less contrast they have, the more they lose their purpose, which is to divide up sections of the page from each other).

And I have a slight bug in the graphics in the top left hand corner of the page, in Firefox. (Haven't tested it in IE7 yet). See attached image.

[donkeyote]

Also, see attached image, this CSS style needs left hand padding:

.blacklarger {color:#000000; font-size:16px; font-family:arial,helvetica;}

and the entire CSS needs redoing, as there is a huge amount of repeated and unnecessary code, and half the styles are named after what they look like (i.e. 'blacklarge', 'blacklarger') which is a complete no-no with CSS.

If you view the CSS code here:
http://uk.six.ebid.net/css/standard.css

styles like this

.blacktiny {color:#000000; font-size:9px; font-family:arial,helvetica;}
.blacktiny a {color:#000000; font-size:9px; font-family:arial,helvetica; text-decoration:underline;}
.blacktiny a:hover {color:#000000; font-size:9px; font-family:arial,helvetica; text-decoration:none;}
.blacktiny select {color:#000000; font-size:9px; font-family:arial,helvetica;}

waste huge amounts of space.

It only needs to be:

.blacktiny, blacktiny select {
color: #000;
font: 9px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
.blacktiny: a {
text-decoration: underline;
}
.blacktiny a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
}

And that applies throughout the CSS.
For example, throughout the CSS, most styles have the declaration:
font-family: arial, helvetica

This doesn't need to repeated throughout the CSS, you just need to set up one initial style at the start (or near the start) of the CSS, like this:
p, h1, h2, h3, h4, ul, li, blacktiny, etc. {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

and then when you enter the 'blacktiny' style, you don't need to put
font-family: arial, helvetica
in, because it's already been done at the top of the page.

Also, the HTML code needlessly uses <span> tags throughout, such as:
<TD><span class="greylarge">BuyNow</span></TD>
<TD><span class="brownlarger"><B>£8.99</B></strong></span><br>

This could be replaced with:
<TD class="greylarge">BuyNow</TD>
<TD class="brownlarger"><B>£8.99</B><br>

The <span> tags don't do anything and are redundant in this case.

(And the <B> tags shouldn't be used here, instead the 'brownlarger' class should be changed so it has this declaration:
font-weight: bold;
or another class should be made, 'brownlargerbold' - although all of the classes with colours in their names should be changed.)
You'd only use the <B> tags if you wanted to make some text that was in the middle of a sentence bold, such as:
<TD class="brownlarger">This is normal, but <B>THIS IS BOLD</B></TD>
and you could make a simple descendent selector, like
.brownlarger b {
font-weight: bold;
color: lightbrown;
}
(I can't remember if the colour 'lightbrown' is recognised by HTML or not, but I put it there because it's a lot clearer than #556960 or whatever light brown is in Hex.)
If you ever decide to change the colour of text that is currently brown, to red, you will have to change the HTML too, otherwise you'll have a CSS style like '.brown' which actually makes the text red! So your HTML will refer to
<td class="brown">Red text</td>
and it will be extremely confusing, to say the least. So you'd have to change the HTML throughout, to say
<td class="red">Red text</td>
which negates the whole point of using CSS.
If they'd used styles like
.Price {
font-size: 14px;
color: red;
}
Then they could use
<td class="Price">£10.99 in red text</td>
and then if they wanted to change the price colour to green, they'd only have to change it in ONE place, the easiest place, in the CSS .Price style.