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 – highlighting the current page in the Navigation


We've already made our asynchronous navigation much better than our simple example, but I think we can keep going and make it even better. Next up, we're going to highlight the page currently being viewed in the navigation to make it easy for our site visitors to see which page they're on.

  1. First up, let's open up styles.css again and write a .current CSS class for the navigation:

    #ajax-nav li.current{ background:#a3bb00; }

    I've made my navigation bar green, so I'm going to make the .current class a slightly lighter shade of green so that the current item is highlighted in the menu. You can follow my example or create your own style—whatever suits your taste.

  2. Now we just need to apply our .current class to the current navigation item. We're going to add a few lines to the hashchange event function we wrote earlier. We'll start by checking to see if there's a hash in the window location:

    $(document).ready(function(){
      $('#ajax-nav...