Newbie here! I would appreciate some help with questions

[kufta4]

I have a few simple questions to ask. Well I think they are simple and hopefully some people will be kind enough here to help me out.


To start, I sell some stuff on eBay. I had football cards that I had collected a few years ago sitting around. They were all in their college uniforms so I decided to get rid of them and I put them into groups by college team on eBay. Well, they sold like hotcakes. I was so surprised at the success I had that I thought Id try and purchase more of the same and try again. Well, that worked too so Im still doing it.

Heres where my questions come in. When I receive the cards in, I take each individual card and import the information into a microsoft excel spreadsheet. This way I know what I have of which team or player which makes it easier to know what I can list instead of having a pile of cards and not knowing whats in it. This keeps things very organized for myself.

What I thought about doing was putting that list on a website so people were able to see what I had incase they wanted to make purchases outside of eBay. Instead of putting the excel sheet on a free website I thought Id splurge and buy one for 10 bucks.

Is there a way that I can put the information thats on the spread sheet onto a webpage? The best part about having the spreadsheet is a person is able to sort by whatever category they feel like sorting by. College, year, last name or whatever the case may be. I was wondering if anyone knows how I could make that easier than having to download the file thats on the website I have now. Are there features on sites from hostgator or godaddy that would fit what Im looking for? If so, would people still be able to sort by the categories? I would like to know that before I bought a site.

Thanks for any help. Its greatly appreciated. My email is kufta4@yahoo.com incase anyone feels the need to email me.

[eLIANT]

1 - Make your site.
2 - Upload the spreadsheet to the directory where all the other files for the site are (with hostgator that would be the "public_html" directory.)
3 - Put a link in your site to the spreadsheet.

This way, visitors can simply look at and sort/filter your spreadsheet, but without saving the modifications. If they want to save their changes, they can save the spreadsheet to their hard drive and play with it all they want.

[gwyneth]

And when you've learned a little more about operating your website, you may find some of the scripts available, both in the form of Excel utilities and in the web application world, useful.

As far as Excel goes, the ASAP utilities are really useful for converting to HTML, but you can start, as Eliant says, with the workbook itself.

[regentronique]

Be informed that, if you use the simple method of just linking your Excel file on your website, people having ActiveX disabled for security on their browser wont be able to see your file content. It would be even worst if they dont have Excel installed on their PC to view the file...

If you want to have a more universal way to show your data to anyone, it would be preferable to convert it into a HTML table and insert it on your website.

[kufta4]

Originally Posted by regentronique

Be informed that, if you use the simple method of just linking your Excel file on your website, people having ActiveX disabled for security on their browser wont be able to see your file content. It would be even worst if they dont have Excel installed on their PC to view the file...

If you want to have a more universal way to show your data to anyone, it would be preferable to convert it into a HTML table and insert it on your website.

Thanks to everybody who's helping.

To convert to to HTML, would I just save it as so and put that file onto the website? Is that what you mean.

Excuse me guys(gals), I know enough about computer to use them with ease but when it comes to this, or the technical terms, Im not all that knowledgeable. Im pretty sure I know what you mean by convertin to HTML though.

Thanks to everyone again!

[cleanxhost]

I think that to be able to convert it to HTML you will need a programme which you can find and download for free if you search "convert excel to html" in Google...

[Goddess Dix]

excel would have a "save as webpage" option. the code's pretty ugly to those of us who do this for a living, but it should work for most people to be able to see it.

you can use your control panel to upload whatever file you make to the "public_html" folder using the info in your welcome email.

good luck.

[slapshotw]

I'd recommend just importing it into Google's free online Spreadsheet program, (go to http://docs.google.com). Once it's there you can set permissions to allow it to be embedded on your own site, and sorted by viewers. This way you don't have to deal with any kinds of conversion issues.

[kufta4]

Thanks guys, Ill try each one and see which one I like.

Heres another question. I dont know how google works technically speaking. I have a site which is "mysite.synthasite.com" but when I google it, nothing comes up. even when I google my exact URL. Can anyone tell me why.

If I were to pay for a domain, will that come up in google? If not, how do I get it to.

Thanks again.

[striddy]

Originally Posted by kufta4

I have a site which is "mysite.synthasite.com" but when I google it, nothing comes up. even when I google my exact URL. Can anyone tell me why.

Google has no knowledge of your site unless either you tell it, or finds links to your site on other sites.

You can add your domain to this google page.

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Google will then index your site in the near future. Please note, this can take a few weeks to occur.

[kufta4]

Really? Hmm, never knew that and find it interesting. So does every site either need to be entered manually or found on a site that already exists in that google page?

Thank you for the help.

Originally Posted by striddy

Google has no knowledge of your site unless either you tell it, or finds links to your site on other sites.

You can add your domain to this google page.

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Google will then index your site in the near future. Please note, this can take a few weeks to occur.

[kufta4]

Originally Posted by slapshotw

I'd recommend just importing it into Google's free online Spreadsheet program, (go to http://docs.google.com). Once it's there you can set permissions to allow it to be embedded on your own site, and sorted by viewers. This way you don't have to deal with any kinds of conversion issues.

I tried that and it says it doesnt support .xlsx programs. I think the x at the end is for excel 07 maybe??

[striddy]

Originally Posted by kufta4

I tried that and it says it doesnt support .xlsx programs. I think the x at the end is for excel 07 maybe??

So instead save as / excel 2003 format (xls)

[kufta4]

Originally Posted by striddy

So instead save as / excel 2003 format (xls)

Yep, I just saw that option when I went to Save As. It worked and now Im veiwing that spreadsheet on that google page. What do I do from here? Is there a way for me to put it on a page on my site?

[kufta4]

This site says

-Publish documents online to the world, as Web pages or post documents to your blog

and

-Embed a spreadsheet, or a piece of a spreadsheet, in your blog or website.

Ill keep tryin to figure it out but Im not seeing how to do it.

[kufta4]

Then it tells me to

1. Open the Share menu in the upper-right corner of the page, and select Publish as a web page.

I dont have a share menu on the upper right corner of the page. Has anyone ever used this program before?

[kufta4]

Nevermind, I didnt think I had to have my document opened. I thought I could just checkmark it from the main page.

[Goddess Dix]

i didn't realize google docs had that option. that's a good idea!

[kufta4]

Originally Posted by striddy

Google has no knowledge of your site unless either you tell it, or finds links to your site on other sites.

You can add your domain to this google page.

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Google will then index your site in the near future. Please note, this can take a few weeks to occur.

If I were to purchase an actual site, would I still have to add my domain to google?

[Hullabaloo]

Google SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and you will see that it is a big business.

Most of the sites will explain a bit about how search engines work, so that they can tell you how hard it is and why you should buy their service.

Most of the sites also offer tips on do-it-yourself SEO (they know that you are not going to pay $$$ to promote a site that make ¢¢¢.)

Also Google "submit my site to search engines" for a lot of free places that do just that. I don't know how good any of them are though.

I thought HG had a free submission widget or link or something but either I'm not finding it or I'm wrong.

One advantage of your own site would be the ability so set up an online database of your cards using MySQL and PHP. You could then access your info from anyplace, so if you were at a flea market and find a bunch of cards, just whip out the trust iPhone or Blackberry and check your stock.

Ain't the 21st Century somethin'???

[Goddess Dix]

Originally Posted by kufta4

If I were to purchase an actual site, would I still have to add my domain to google?

if you were to purchase an actual site from where?

adding your url to google takes about 30 seconds. if you're not interested in doing that, then I guess you can wait for google to pick up the link from someplace and hope it gets in.

if you want to drive more traffic to your site, however, and not pay someone to do this for you, it will require some effort on your part. submitting to google is a good (and very easy) first step. you can also sign up for their webmaster tools and use one of the free, online services to create a sitemap for your site to submit to google (and yahoo, and other search engines). this helps keep your site indexed in those search engines.

there's no real automatic process to do this that i'm aware of. if you do a seach on "seo" as suggested, you can learn more about how the process works. but yes, there is labor and learning involved.

[kufta4]

Originally Posted by Goddess Dix

if you were to purchase an actual site from where?

adding your url to google takes about 30 seconds. if you're not interested in doing that, then I guess you can wait for google to pick up the link from someplace and hope it gets in.

if you want to drive more traffic to your site, however, and not pay someone to do this for you, it will require some effort on your part. submitting to google is a good (and very easy) first step. you can also sign up for their webmaster tools and use one of the free, online services to create a sitemap for your site to submit to google (and yahoo, and other search engines). this helps keep your site indexed in those search engines.

there's no real automatic process to do this that i'm aware of. if you do a seach on "seo" as suggested, you can learn more about how the process works. but yes, there is labor and learning involved.

What I meant was buy a domain from like HG or godaddy.

[cleanxhost]

Originally Posted by kufta4

If I were to purchase an actual site, would I still have to add my domain to google?

YES. The same as explained below...

Originally Posted by striddy http://forums.hostgator.com/theme-ho...s/viewpost.gif
Google has no knowledge of your site unless either you tell it, or finds links to your site on other sites.

You can add your domain to this google page.

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Google will then index your site in the near future. Please note, this can take a few weeks to occur.

[Goddess Dix]

Originally Posted by kufta4

What I meant was buy a domain from like HG or godaddy.

buying the domain is not enough for search engines to know about it your site, no, regardless of where you buy it from. normally, it will have to be either submitted to a search engine or discovered by a search engine spider linked from somewhere else.

[mp3]

If you become a little more interesting in the website part of this, you could try putting the information in a database (such as MySQL) and then displaying it using something like PHP.

If you want to get really fancy, you could even make the information available via a web service.

All just things to think about in the future.