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 – adding a loading animation


Next, we'd like to show the site visitor that something is happening as soon as they click on the link in the navigation. Remember that if the response from the server is slow, the site visitor can't see that anything is happening. Even though the browser is hard at work fetching the content for the new page, there's no indication to the site visitor that anything is happening. Let's add in a little animation to make it obvious that something's happening on our page.

Loading animations can take many different forms: spinning daisies, animated progress bars, blinking dots—anything that will communicate that there's an action in progress will help make your site feel snappier and more responsive for your site visitors.

  1. First, head over to http://ajaxload.info to create and download a loading animation of your choice.

  2. Select the type, background color, and foreground color in the Generator box, then click on the Generate It! button.

  3. You'll see a preview...