Want to turn your first time readers into long term visitors? Sometimes, it isn’t about the golden content you provide or the glorious insight you offer – sometimes it’s all about how much fun your readers have on your website.
This post is all about using visual effects on your blog and website effectively, creatively, and wisely.
Let your readers have fun when they check out your site – make things more interesting, more fun, and more aesthetically appealing, and you will have no issue keeping your readers forever.
Utilize these tools and you’re sure to impress anybody that visits your site. Give them something to play with!
This example demonstrates the Apple downloads slider/accordion effect using the jQuery Accordion plugin.
jQuery plugin used to get the fade and highlight effect.
jCarousel is a jQuery plugin for controlling a list of items in horizontal or vertical order.
The stylesheet switcher allows your visitors to choose which stylesheet they would like to view your site with.
A large and translucent message that’s displayed over the contents of your screen.
Allows you to add an instant picture effect (including tilt) to images on your webpages.
FancyForm is a powerful checkbox replacement script used to provide the ultimate flexibility in changing the appearance and function of HTML form elements.
A replacement for the standard checkbox that allows you to change the look of checkbox elements in your page.
Some fancy “easing” effects for elements on your website.
Got more you want to add? Just drop a comment and share your opinions and feedback!
For more web design tutorials check out the new tutorial site, The Tutorialist.
readywpthemes
April 10, 2008 at 12:24 am
Thanks for this great collection….
Greg Wardwell
April 10, 2008 at 7:07 am
This is a great list of effects! I’ve used JCarousel in the past.
I would like to add Adobe’s Spry framework for Ajax to this list:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/home.html
I’ve been experimenting with it lately and have found it to be a great option for a variety of my needs due to its ease of development as well as its variety of pre-built widgets. One of my personal favorites is the Spy Accordion Widget:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/samples/accordion/AccordionSample.html#DefaultBehavior
Like many widgets, creating a collection of elements on your page (divs in this case), giving them the appropriate id’s or classes, and calling your JavaScript function transforms your html into an accordion menu. Not only is it simple to implement, it degrades incredibly well.
Graham Smith
April 10, 2008 at 8:39 am
Yup, another fine collection. Like to bottom set of on and off buttons, very stylish.
One of my fav’s but I know its quite popular is the Java LightBox script for displaying images in a semi transparent overlay over the entire screen, that sort of grows outward.
Have added this to my site, for some of my photograph categories. I really like it, its not immediately obvious either until your click the image, nice and subtle.
Also the various JQuery tabbed box menus you can get, too many to mention, but they all serve a useful purpose to tidy up your front end.
JQuery is one technology that I am really excited about learning, seems to damn cool.
Marco
April 10, 2008 at 10:51 am
There we go again, yet another great article!
Stumbled + feautured on my website! Keep it up writing such useful posts.
Sandy Fox
April 10, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Cool! I really like the floating title and checkbox. I am not much a coder though, so I’m sure I’ll have “fun” trying to implement it
Sandy Fox
April 11, 2008 at 9:49 am
Hey, i was just showing this page to a colleague from work and he didn’t know where the term “Klaatu Brada Nikto” came from (no, not army of darkness). Am I the only “old-timer who remember the movie?
Paul Hempsall
April 19, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Klaatu, Barada and Nikto were also creatures on Jabba’s sail barge in Return of the Jedi – a subtle nod from George Lucas to a great sci-fi film.
I know… I ooze geek!