Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By : Natalie Maclees
Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By: Natalie Maclees

Overview of this book

jQuery is awesome for designers ñ it builds easily on the CSS and HTML you already know and allows you to create impressive effects with just a few lines of code. However, without a background in programming, JavaScript ñ on which jQuery is built ñ can feel intimidating and impossible to grasp. This book will show you how simple it can be to learn the basics and then extend your capabilities by taking advantage of jQuery plugins.jQuery for Designers offers approachable lessons for designers with little or no background in JavaScript. The book begins by introducing the jQuery library and a small and simple introduction to JavaScript. Then you'll step through a few simple tasks to get your feet wet before diving into using plugins to quickly and simply add complex effects with just a few lines of code.You'll be surprised at how far you can get with JavaScript when you start with the power of the jQuery library and this book will show you how. We'll cover common interface widgets and effects such as tabbed interfaces, custom tooltips, and custom scrollbars. You'll learn how to create an animated navigation menu and how to add simple AJAX effects to enhance your site visitors' experience. Then we'll wrap up with interactive data grids which make sorting and searching data easy.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – making it fancy


  1. Let's start with a little CSS to change the cursor to a pointer and add a little hover effect to our questions to make it obvious to site visitors that the questions are clickable. Open up the styles.css file that's inside the styles folder and add this bit of CSS:

    dt       {
           color: #268bd2;
           font-weight: bold;
           cursor: pointer;
           margin: 0 0 1em 0;
           }
    
    dt:hover       {
           color: #2aa198;
           }

    That definitely helps to communicate to the site visitor that the questions are clickable.

  2. When we click a question to see the answer, the change isn't communicated to the site visitor very well – the jump in the page is a little disconcerting and it takes a moment to realize what just happened. It would be nicer and easier to understand if the question were to slide into view; the site visitor could literally see the question appearing and would understand immediately what change just happened on the screen.

    jQuery makes it easy for...