• Have a carousel featuring the top content in your site.
Using jCarousel, you can have a fancy sliding effect on your homepage letting users skim through the top posts in an elegant and sleek manner! jCarousel can be downloaded from Sorgalla.com1 and is very easy to integrate into your site.
• Implement tabs with jQuery.
Tabs are fun, easy, and immensely useful on a webpage. Authors can use it to divide information or create navigable interfaces. Using jQuery, creating tabs are a breeze. Tabs are part of jQuery’s UI extension2, and is a breeze to integrate and use.
• Fancy tooltips.
Tooltips are ideal for informing users about any element on a webpage without having to integrate the information into the flow of the page. However, tooltips can’t make use of anything but text, and are often implemented dodgily in browsers, showing up and going away at random. Using jQuery and the Tooltips plugin3, not only does the developer control the tooltip, it can incorporate any html tag he needs.
• Have flickr like notes on your images.
Don’t we all love the way flickr lets us add notes to images? Well, now an image on your site can, too. Using jQuery’s ImgNotes plugin4 images can be easily tagged and noted.
• Target browsers using jQuery.
Yes, everyone knows that targetting a specific browser is evil, you can’t help but do it sometimes. jQuery has a robust browser detection object which helps you target any browser you want.
• Get a date picker for your forms.
Getting users to input dates the way you want them can be hard, and using drop down menus for date, month and year separately makes it rather cumbersome for the user. Rather than that, why not use a date picker to make the process intuitive and easy for the user and even easier for yourself. Using the jQuery date picker5 does just that.
• Get columns with equal heights.
Getting multiple columns to line up vertically with equal height can be a pain for any professional web designer. Using a couple of lines of jQuery6, the problem is easily solved, and the columns line up like they were made to do so!
• Enhance your articles by implementing pull quotes.
Pull quotes on an article not only make it look much professional, but also adds depth to it. However, implementing pull quotes manually can be very hard work indeed. Using jQuery and the pull quotes plugin7, anyone can easily implement it on all the articles on a website.
• Drop caps.
Dropping the first letter of an article has always been practiced by newspapers, and adds a retro charm to an article. jQuery can help implement a drop cap8 with as much ease as writing the first letter!
• Having an autocompleter.
Having an autocompleter is a boon to all your users, and they’ll thank you for having one implemented. Get it and install it hassle free with jQuery and the autocompleter tutorial9.
• Fancy scrollbars.
Tired of the same old scrollbars on your website that you see everywhere? Why not make your own? It’s easy to make and even easier to implement when using jScrollPane10. It has tonnes of customisable ways of using your own scrollbars to jazz up your site.
• Get a slideshow.
Every person loves to show off images. Be it of themselves, their family, or of their own photography. Instead of using boring old static images users have to scroll through, web designers can now spruce up the images on their site by creating a slideshow. Using jQuery and the Cycle plugin11, developers can customise the behavior of the slideshow and have special effects.
• Get an accordion!
Accordions are nothing but fancier implementation of tabs. They’re very useful, and can be used everywhere. jQuery makes it dead simple to implement them with the accordion plugin12.
• Giving images a lovely drop shadow.
Everyone wants their website to have the most perfect image display. Drop shadows, obviously, rank highly among design aides used to enhance image display. And how better to wrap images in a drop shadow than with jQuery13, using unobtrusive and easy to use method.
• Form validation using jQuery.
One of the most important features a website has are forms. It is the one way users can interact with the developers and authors. It is also the easiest way by which scammers and hackers can gain access to unsuspecting developers’ servers. That is why validating a form is of paramount importance. Using jQuery, the hassle of form validation can be easily avoided by simply following a few steps14.
• In page popups using ThickBox.
Using Thickbox15 along with jQuery, developers can design websites with popups that do not hinder or deviate from the flow of the page, keeping the focus on the same page, and does not disturb the user by opening a new popup window. Thickbox can be used to incorporate any new page or content block or images into the inline popups.
• Rounded corners with jQuery.
Rounded corners can be really hard and cumbersome to implement using normal HTML and CSS, what with a lot of extra divs and styling. Using jQuery and the rounded corners plugin16, rounded corners are a breeze, and can be easily implemented on any content block within the web site.
• Tree based views.
Tree based interfaces can be hard to pull off with normal HTML. But with jQuery and the treeView plugin17, creating trees become painless and easy.
• Creating draggable objects within the webpage.
Enabling the users to drag and drop objects within the webpage adds a new element of interactivity with the site, and makes the browsing experience more intuitive for the user. Using the Draggable UI Object18, creating draggable blocks in jQuery is as easy as dragging it into the site, and the results are awesome.
• Creating a style switcher.
Giving users the power to change the webpage stylesheet is not only cool, it also makes the user think that much higher of the developer. Using jQuery, creating a style switcher is very easy19, and makes the process a breeze.