eBid Widgets, by Kimbo, at the eBid auction site - some help for new sellers... I hope!

Adding a signature to your posts

NEW! Want to see this as an audio/visual guide? Try the new all talking, all clicking signature guide on my Widgets site! Remember to turn on your speakers first.

If you take part in the forums on eBid, you will probably find it useful to have a "signature" on your posts. This is a piece of text that gets added to the bottom of every post you make. It can contain messages such as "Cheers, Kimbo!", a link to your ebid store or auctions, a small banner (the size is limited by ebid), and anything else you think helpful or useful or just decorative!

To make your sig as effective as possible, you can put your store banner into your text, and make it a clickable link

First things first... find your signature. When posting into the forums there is a menu line across the screen near the top, the first of these says "user cp". This is your profile, and contains much useful information - feed it as much as you can, to tell other ebidders about yourself and your stuff. Down the left side menu of your user cp you will see "edit signature".

When you click on edit signature it will take you to the appropriate screen. To do all the fancy things you want, you will need to be using the right sort of editor (this is chooseable, so we'll just check...) Your screen should look something like this, without my signature information of course. :D

If you don't see that sort of screen you haven't got the right editor yet. Go back to your left-side user cp menu and you'll see "edit options". Click on that and scroll down through the whole lot (you'll see several interesting things you might want to come back to later) and at the end you will find a box for choosing the editor you use. Make sure you select the full WYSIWYG format.

Go back to "edit signature" if you've had to make this small detour, and you'll see the edit screen I showed you above.

Type in whatever standard text you want - that's easy enough. Now, I'm assuming you would like to add a link to your store. Do you know how to find the address for your store, or for the part of it you want to link to? Just in case... In another browser window (you don't want to lose what you've done so far!) go to your own ebid store and display it on the screen as a visitor would.

Now you'll need to store the "address" (url) of your store or section. Visit your store and select the section you want to link to. Once there highlight the address in your browser address bar (at the top) and copy to your clipboard (press control-key and c at the same time, or right click and copy).



This will remember your store address so that we can paste it into your sig.

At this stage you have a few choices... you can put the link in plain and simple, or you can make a piece of text or your "sig pic" your link.

1.Making your link from the address

Go back to the window with your edit signature window and simply paste the URL into your signature. This will produce a simple text link to your store. You can precede it with "visit my store" or put "click the link to see my stuff" or whatever you like.

or 2. Making some text into the link

You can type in some text in the edit box, and then select that text using your mouse. For example "Take a look at my stuff", could be typed in, then selected.



When you've highlighted the right text click on the little blue globe icon, and that will bring up a "dialogue box" for the address. Control/V will paste in the address you copied from your store earlier.

or 3. Making a picture into your link

It's a popular option to use one of your shop banners as a "signature picture" (sigpic) and make it into a clickable link. If you want to use this option, you first need to select your sigpic.



First you must choose the picture to be your banner - select this from your own computer, or you can refer to a location (URL) on your own web site or a hosting site such as Photobucket. Put the location in / browse to fetch, and then press "upload" to save your sigpic to the box above where you're currently working. This just saves the picture, but does not yet put it into your sig. As the last step to make it appear there, remember to click on "insert signature picture". This will put a short code into your signature edit box of [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]. You can cut and paste this code to wherever you want it to appear.

This will make your banner appear in your signature. To make this a clickable link, use the same technique in option 2 above - select the code [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] and when it's highlighted use the globe icon to paste (control/V) in your shop address, previously stored. If you've accidentally over-written your clipboard in that time, go back to the earlier step and fetch the address again! It won't take as long the second time you do it. ;o)

Now remember to save your changes! Press the "save signature" button at the bottom of the screen. You should now have a simple text signature with an active link to your auctions. I suggest you check this out by making a few posts and looking at the results, before you try to do anything else.