How do I use HTML on Craigslist?

When you post to many of the categories on Craigslist you are provided with a built-in system for uploading up to four pictures or graphics images to the post. I explain exactly how this works in my "how-to" report. One of the issues with the built-in image system is that Craigslist automatically reduces the resolution from your original pictures down to a lower, standardized resolution. While these are usually fine for selling an old chair or similar item, if you are running an eBusiness or website promotion post you may want more control.

An easy way to add a picture is to use HTML code. First you must have an image file, something saved in a .jpg, .gif, or .png format, and this image must be stored somewhere on the web other than Craigslist.

If you have a website, you could upload your image to it and basically refer to it at that location. An example would be if I wanted to create a post that had my site logo as an image. I would use the following HTML code in my post:

<img src="http://www.amillionplaces.com/logo.jpg">

Note that I have supplied the exact path to my logo, and you can test this by pasting the http://www.amillionplaces.com/logo.jpg into your browser as a URL. Hit enter and my logo should appear like the following:

You can enhance the image a bit by adding some resizing code, such as:

<img src="http://www.amillionplaces.com/logo.jpg" width="200">
Which is telling the browser to display the same image but scaled down to 200 pixlels wide.
It will look like the following:




Another easy thing to do is to add some alternate text for blind users and also potential search engine use:

<img src="http://www.amillionplaces.com/logo.jpg" width="200" alt="Please visit amillionplaces.com">
It will look like the following:





When you hover over this in some browsers, the alt text may appear.

The last bit will add a hyperlink to an external site, in this example below, it is to my site here. This could direct people to your website or eProduct pages.

<a href="http://www.amillionplaces.com">
<img src="http://www.amillionplaces.com/logo.jpg" width="200" alt="Please visit amillionplaces.com">
</a>

This should result in the following:




I just tested the above code on my latest Craigslist posting to the tampabay.craigslist.org, under "creative services". Works fine. If you don't have a website, you could use a free picture sharing service to "host" your image file.