I remember the first website I designed back in 1997. As a graphic artist, I was pretty darn proud of myself. Here was my site that was going to make me rich…

I published the site, and could hardly wait to show others my work and achievement.

Later that weekend I was at my parent’s house and brought my audience to the computer so I could show then my site. I loaded it up, and waited in anticipation as it slowly loaded… ( remember this is dial up back then at about 20kbps ). Here it comes, here it comes….

Wham, the site appears and it is completely skewed. The site doesn’t look anything like my version. The fonts are all messed up, the graphics in the wrong spot and the it looks like a monkey had designed the site. What the heck…

Returning home - and obsessed with figuring out what went wrong - the site still looked fine on my computer. So what happened ?

With nearly 10 years of experience under my belt now, I realize that the issue back then was using what is called non-default fonts. In other words, I used fonts directly off my computer which meant that when I designed something on my system, it looked fine because my computer knew where to find the right font reference when the site loaded. But if you don’t have the same fonts on your computer, your system will automatically substitute a font it does have which can really mess things up in the visual presentation.

In a recent auction I conducted, I ran into the same problem. I built an auction that used some graphics from my system and simply pasted them them into my auction listing. I previewed the auction and everything looked great. The 5 day listing sold, but for a disappointing price.

A few days later, I was looking at the listing from a computer at my cottage, and suddenly realized that none of my graphics were showing up. I looked at the html code, and sure enough, the ebay design system simply assigns the root path to the graphic in the html. In this case, the root was to my hard drive, which of course a viewer doesn’t have access to. This meant that every time a person tried to view my auction, all my graphics were lost - yet when I looked at my auction from my own computer, it looked great.

The solution is easy though. What you need to do is put the graphics on the web by uploading them via ftp to a server. ( publish them online ) and then use your reference tags to point to their direction on the web rather than your hard drive. An even simpler way then is to call the graphics up from their web address location and then copy and paste the graphic into your auction. The root location will then automatically load into your listing and the graphics will be available to any person viewing it.

I know this might sound a bit technical, but it’s easy once you get the hang of it. If you need help, or have any questions, contact me and I’ll walk you through it.