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

Planning a slideshow


There are a few things to consider when you're preparing to build a jQuery slideshow. They are as follows:

  • First, you have to decide what will be the experience for users who have JavaScript disabled. The priority of the various pieces of content in the slideshow should be your guide. If the slideshow is simply featuring bits of content available elsewhere on the site, then it should be sufficient to simply show one photo or slide. If the slideshow is the only way to access the content, then you'll have to be sure to make that content available for users without JavaScript enabled. We'll take a look at both strategies in the various examples in this chapter.

  • Second, you have to determine if all items in your slideshow will be of the same size or of different sizes. For obvious reasons, it's easiest to handle items that are all the same size and aspect ratio, but sometimes, it's impractical or impossible to identically size all items. I'll cover which slideshows are ideal...