Putting text around a Paypal button?

Glad to hear that you're joining the world of ecommerce and I appreciate the simplicity and reliability that Paypal offers - heck, I use it too, on this site - and I also understand your challenges with integrating the Paypal buttons into your existing site design.

So let's dig into this a bit...

First off, let me grab one of the buttons off my Buy Dave A Chai page (where you can thank me for my free efforts on this site by buying me a nice warm spiced tea, or two!). The button looks like this:

That's not too unattractive, but let's have a look at the code underneath it, shall we?

<form name='_xclick' action='https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr' 
   method='post'>
<input type='hidden' name='cmd' value='_xclick' />
<input type='hidden' name='currency_code' value='USD' />
<input type='hidden' name='item_name' value='Buy Dave a chai' />
<input type='hidden' name='no_shipping' value='1' />
<input type='hidden' name='rm' value='2' />
<input type='hidden' name='cbt' value='Return to Ask Dave Taylor!' />
<input type='hidden' name='amount' value='4.50' />
<input type='submit' value="Buy Dave a grande soy chai: $4.50" />
</form>

This is rather intimidating, so I can understand your reticence when it comes to getting it working on your page, but here's the secret: HTML forms lay out exactly like a <div> block does (or, if you're an old school HTML coder, a <p> block).

With this knowledge, you should be able to see that you can drop a form into a table element and then use other cells of the table to put text around the button (or, even better, have the form and the additional text all in the table, but have the begin and end <form> tag outside the table for even easier layout).

For example, if I wanted to tuck some small print immediately below the button, it might look like this:

<form name='_xclick' action='https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr' 
   method='post'>
<input type='hidden' name='cmd' value='_xclick' />
<input type='hidden' name='currency_code' value='USD' />
<input type='hidden' name='item_name' value='Buy Dave a chai' />
<input type='hidden' name='no_shipping' value='1' />
<input type='hidden' name='rm' value='2' />
<input type='hidden' name='cbt' value='Return to Ask Dave Taylor!' />
<input type='hidden' name='amount' value='4.50' />
<center>
<input type='submit' value="Buy Dave a grande soy chai: $4.50" />
<div style="font-size:60%">Dave's surprisingly thirsty right now!</div>
</center>
</form>

This will format nicely as:

See how that works?

Forms are just another block element on a page, so you can really push them around and place them as you would any other block, through an overarching table design for layout, if you'd like, or with CSS positioning (relative or absolute) or even by using attributes like align= (with some experimentation).

Finally, note that there's nothing special about a weblog entry either, so there's no reason you couldn't have a Paypal button in your entry directly (as I have with this article!) by cutting and pasting in the block of content from Paypal's button builder.

Hope that gets you started in the right direction, and if you are interested in learning more about HTML, may I recommend my best-selling book Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML and CSS, from J. Wiley & Sons?