Navigation is one of the most important elements in web design. It has to be neat, usable and creative at the same time in order to not scare your visitors away. jQuery is one of the most powerful tools to enhance your navigation and make it stand out. With jQuery you can bring together both the creative and usable. This article will cover many and superb jQuery plugins that will make your menus look awesome.

mb.verticalSlider

It lets you show a long list of elements managing pagination, it can work with elements already in the DOM of your page or load them via Ajax when needed, it also works with a mouse wheel.

Fly Slideshow

Fly SlideShow is a jQuery Slideshow script to present images as an automatic slideshow with a nice “fly” effect. Images fly from left to right with and have a fade effect.
It also features:

  • Direct navigation (you can jump to any slide by clicking dots at top-right corner)
  • Previous/next controls
  • Image decriptions (it gets them from alt tag)
  • Only 5kb size

Photo Rotator jQuery Plugin

Photo Rotator JQuery plugin is an easy to use JQuery plugin for a web developer to build a JavaScript gallery on their web application. The plugin can be driven by xml. Easy setup and only minimum programming knowledge is needed. Best to showcase your photography.

Highlighted features:

  • Driven by xml or arrays
  • 3D Transition Effects (support in Safari)
  • Easy to setup
  • Slide show controls
  • Easy customization
  • Compatible with IOS mobile safari

Smart Cart 2 – jQuery Sopping Crt Pug-in

Smart Cart 2 is a flexible and feature rich jQuery plug-in for shopping cart. It makes the add-to-cart section of online shopping much easier and user friendly. It is very easy to implement and only minimal HTML required. The selected items in the cart are accessible as an array of product/quantity pair delimited with ‘|’ on submit form or when checkout event is triggered. Smart Cart 2 have a simple and compact design with tabbed interface to save space.

Hijax

The Hijax plugin is a JQuery plugin which allows you to add Ajax capabilities to your site, while maintaining search engine friendliness and browser history button support. It provides a simple and easy way to transform your site into a dynamic Ajax site, providing a richer user experience.

jQuery One Page Navigation Plugin

With this plugin you’ll make the page scroll smoothly when the navigation is clicked. It also automatically highlights the correct navigation section depending upon which section is scrolled to.