Web Design Tips: Combining jQuery Effects and Plugins For A Great Marketing Effect

The lightweight (small file size) and concise jQuery library makes it relatively easy to add interactive effects and merchandising to just about any ecommerce website.

In this edition of "Web Design Tips," I will quickly show you how to combine a few jQuery effects and the jCarousel jQuery plugin to create a merchandising section near the top of a sample page. This merchandising section will show four products at a time and slide to the left, revealing additional products every three seconds. When a visitor aims his mouse pointer at one of the product images, the slider will stop and display a brief product description for that item.

Downloading jCarousel

For the example in the video, I used Jan Sorgalla's excellent jCarousel plugin.

To start, I downloaded the most recent version of the plugin (version 0.2.3 at the time) and got a zip file full of great stuff—CSS, a couple of images, and three JavaScript files, including the jQuery library version 1.2.3.

The most recent version of jQuery at the time of writing was version 1.3.2, but unfortunately jCarousel did not function as expected when I tried to use it with the newest jQuery library. This incompatibility is not a huge problem, but can come into play if we were making use of other plugins or effects that specifically relied on the newer version of the jQuery JavaScript library

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