JQuery HomePage Slider
The same great look and feel of Flash, without the bloating!
The “Home Page Scroller” is a fantastic way to present multiple frames of your websites key content and features to your visitors without taking up a huge amount of screen space. As a bonus it animates and scrolls and generally looks pretty cool.
This achieves 2 things:
1. When visitors first come to your page they are presented with a slick looking animation that grabs there attention.
2. That slick animation that has their attention, displays the most important information you want to present to your users.
Check out a couple of our sites to see this method in action:
I already have flash on my site. Why would I want to change to jQuery? What are the benefits of jQuery over flash?
Simply put jQuery is like comparing a Lotus sports car to Flash’s 1975 Buick. Lets take a look at some of the key points:
- Light Weight – meaning small files sizes and load times
- No Plugin Required – all major browser come ready to handle jQuery.
- SEO Friendly – search engines like Google, Bing and Yayoo will see your jQuery content clear as day.
- Mobile Device Compatible – popular handheld devices like the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Googles new Android based phones, and many others all support jQuery.
- Pseudo Flash – jQuery allows developers to create rich and interactive sites that utilize animation, video, and other features that previously were only possible thru Flash.
Google can’t see my website! I need better Search Engine Optimization(aka SEO)
Search engines as smart as they are, work in a basic way. They start at the top and work their way down looking at all of the elements of your site and index your site based on it’s content. Like a lot of websites, chances are you have a nice big area at the top or near the very top of your site displaying images, your company logo, branding, maybe some feature content. You may even have a home page slider like we have been talking about so far. Is this content presented in Flash? If it is then search engines look at your site and say, “Hmm…there is nothing here”. This means when a search engine looks at your site it is missing a lot of key information. No wonder you are not getting great SEO results.
The great thing about jQuery is that when developed properly, it allows search engines like Google, Bling and Yahoo to see and index your content while enabling that content to be manipulated and presented in a variety of ways that previously were only available through Flash(eg. home page scroller).
I want visitors to be able to view my website on their Mobile Devices!
In the highly competitive mobile market, it seems every manufacturer has their own mobile browser. While a lot of these mobile browsers are based off of a few standard layout engines(eg. webkit, gecko), there still are a lot of inconsistencies inregards to support across all of these browsers.
What does this mean for you? Almost all browsers support jQuery and only a select few are starting to support flash. If you want visitors to be able to view and access content on their mobile devices, jQuery is defiantly the way to go.
If you are really curious about the various mobile engines check out this link at Wikipedia.
No Plugins Required!
You want your website to be accessible to as many people as possible right? The great thing about jQuery is that it is supported in all major browsers with no additional software or plugin’s to install.
If you use flash to display some key information and a visitor who does not have the flash plugin installed visits your site, they are not going to be able to view that content. This will drastically degrade the user experience for a visitor.
I want a website that looks really cool and is an interactive experience to the user, like all those “Flash Sites” I see on the internet!
Chances are a lot of those “flash sites” you have seen were done using jQuery. If they weren’t then they probably should have been! Jquery gives designers and developers the ability to utilize a huge spectrum of animation techniques, fades, tabbed and scrolling content, as well as loading content from external sources. And what is the greatest bonus? As we mentioned previously, all of this content will be SEO friendly, unlike Flash.
For an example of one of these websites checkout Polaris Sells – Edmonton Real Estate
iPod, iPhone, iPad Friendly
With the recent launch of Apple’s iPad there has been a lot of controversy in the media and technology industry over the issue of supporting flash, or more the lack there of. Right now(and probably for the foreseeable future) Apple does not support flash. Although the iPhone only accounts for 15% of the mobile market, that still translates into millions of phones. Not to mention the fact that the majority of other mobile devices do not support flash either. What do these devices support? You guessed it…jQuery! No matter what the mobile device, jQuery has you and your visitors covered!
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