Rolling Out New Website Features? Create Slick Feature Tour With Joyride jQuery Plugin
Over the past few years, the custom design shop known as Zurb has compiled an impressive track record of developing unique and innovative web solutions. One of their latest web design tools is the Joyride jQuery plugin, a Javascript module that helps designers craft interactive features tour pages for websites. A features tour section is a must for any website nowadays, but it’s not always clear how to go about implementing one. The Joyride plugin makes features tour creation simple and hassle-free.
The features tour of your website is often the first thing that a visitor or potential client will click on after the “About Us” page. It’s a showcase for your strengths and accomplishments, which is why it makes sense to put your best foot forward. Joyride is 100% cross-browser compatible, eschews images in favor of pure CSS and allows you to create a features tour using nothing but a couple of lines of jQuery code and a few ol and li tags.
Setup and Configuration
Installing and using Joyride is about as easy as it gets when it comes to jQuery plugins. Just download the zip or tar archive and extract it to your root directory. After that, it’s merely a matter of linking to the
jquery.joyride.js stylesheets/app.css jquery-1.6.2.min.js
files included in the zipped folder from within the head section of any page. To create “stops” on your feature tour, all you have to do is apply header, paragraph and anchor id attributes to the elements you want to include. As long as you’re generally familiar with the absolute basics of jQuery UI design, using Joyride ought to be fairly straightforward and painless.
Performance and Demo
For a better idea of how Joyride works in the field, the fantastically done demo page found on Infinite WordPress is worth a look. Thanks to Joyride’s liberal MIT License, you’re free to do just about anything you want with the plugin. Advanced jQuery developers can certainly hack the module as much as they like, although the default functionality should be more than enough for most. It’s quite fast and responsive as it is, and the built-in options governing transitions and animations give you a lot wiggle room to work with when building a feature tour.
A solid grasp of Javascript and a firm understanding of the jQuery framework have become necessities in the world of contemporary web design. The average web surfer expects seamless interactivity in their web interfaces nowadays. Joyride gives you the power to deliver just that in your website’s features tour section. Much like the rest of Zurb’s handy web design and development tools, Joyride makes life a whole lot easier for web workers who just want to produce beautiful and useful interfaces without a lot of fuss.
