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

Customizing the navigation menu


The included CSS with the Superfish plugin makes creating an interactive navigation menu quick and simple, but a soft blue menu isn't going to fit into every design, so let's take a look at how we can customize the menu.

We're going to take a look at how we can customize the look of the menu by writing our own CSS, customize the animation for showing the nested menus, highlight the current page, and enhance the hover behavior of the menu.

We're going to get started by writing some CSS to create a custom look for our menus. We're going to use the Suckerfish Dropdown approach to create a menu that will work for our site visitors who don't have JavaScript enabled. I'd like to create a soft gradient background and have my menu items appear to be ribbons floating over the top of this background. My menu will look similar to the following screenshot:

I'm going to really take advantage of the newer CSS3 properties available for use in modern browsers. I'm using gradients...