Websites have limited functionality without plugins. Here is a collection of six useful jQuery plugins to improve your website or side project, which you can download for free.
It contains a slider plugin, readability improvement plugin, awesome scroll plugin, and more.
But first, let’s start with the basics.
What is jQuery?
For those of you new to web development, jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to operate on multiple computing platforms and simplify HTML scripting on the client-side (user’s web browser, rather than on server-side, i.e. on the web server). In essence, jQuery is a Document Object Model manipulation library (DOM), meaning that it represents all web page elements in a tree-structure and simplifies the syntax for manipulating the DOM elements. Due to its fantastic functionality: being free, open-source and licensed under the MIT License, jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library in use today, with almost 70% installations on the web (retrieved from w3techs, March 28, 2016).
What jQuery does:
– separates JavaScript
– promotes brevity and clarity
– eliminates cross-browser incompatibilities
– extensibility
6 Free jQuery Plugins:
Unslider
If you are in search of a small slider that only slides – Unslider is your best choice. This tiny responsive slider can contain slides with HTML, supports CSS configuration and keyboard control, too.
TwentyTwenty by Zurb
Is your site full of BEFORE and AFTER images placed one next to the other to display differences? This is so boring. That’s why Zurb developed this plugin which uses drag slider which clearly shows what changes have been made in the image below.
Readable
Readability became a major factor in web design. This plugin will help you improve readability of your site’s page and make it a lot easier to scan or read (they say that 75 characters are enough for optimum readability).
Scroll Path
Another light plugin – Scroll Path allows you to create scroll paths for your content – and make your site visitors stay longer with your awesome content and engage more!
Avgrund Modal
If you want to tweak your popups a bit, then Avgrund Modal is the right plugin for your site. When you download (for free) and install it, your notification will pop up and push and blur the back image, thus highlighting the content upfront.
Tabslet
If you are in need of tabs, this lightweight plugin can help you with that. Armed with a plethora of functionalities, such as next/previous controls, rotation, deep linking, etc., it will suit all your needs.
Read more:
- How to become a web developer: the basics
- How to become a web designer?
- Top 5 web design project management tools
