Best Website Design Review Blog

I am reading a new jQuery book from Sitepoint at the moment. It’s called jQuery: Novice to Ninja and it promises to take you from beginner to expert. If you have copied and pasted jQuery code up to now without thinking or knowing how it works, this book could be for you! The book covers a whole range of examples so it’s also very good for intermediates. I have used some of the code from the first chapters already!

The book weighs in at just over 400 pages and is divided into nine chapters that start with the basics of jQuery, and its use for selecting, decorating and enhancing your HTML, and moving on to chapters about, for example, animations, images and slideshows, menus, tabs, and tooltips, and Ajax. The book also includes a final chapter on creating a jQuery plugin and advanced methods for extending jQuery.

I’ll post a more in depth review when I have read through the whole book.

Over the last week or so I have come across several websites that allow users to navigate using the left and right arrow keys. I think this is an interesting approach and I really like this method of navigating a website. Perhaps it’s just me but I like using keyboard shortcuts (because they seem to allow me to do things faster) …. so it’s interesting to see websites using the left and right keys in this way. Here are the website examples I have spotted that use this method.

• Crush + Lovely. This is a fantastic design and the left and right keys enable you to scroll between the various content sections. Try it and see!
• Pictory is a photo story website and it uses left and right keyboard navigation in a similar way.
• Thinking for a Living uses left and right keys for horizontal scrolling between sections/pages.
• OnSugar uses a left-right arrow key method to navigate between images in a gallery.

There is an adding keyboard navigation tutorial at jQuery for Designers which explains how a similar effect is achieved with an image slider. The jQuery Tools website has Scrollable which enables a content slider to be navigated with left-right keys.

There may be disadvantages to this method but I’m keen to find out more about it so if you know of other websites that use this approach, let me know.