'Net Features : web design

Barriers to Engaging Web Design

Michael Garrity — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:30:00 GMT

For all intents and purposes, design is the most important part of a website when it comes to getting users to convert, and what matters more than that, right?

Unfortunately, even on the most thoughtfully designed websites, there can be extraneous circumstances that make the whole site, or just specific pages, less engaging for users than they ought to be, which can ultimately hurt the site’s overall ability to convert. Certainly, the bleakest of realities for Web professionals is to realize that one or more pages on their websites just aren’t living up to the stringent expectations of consumers.

There are a handful of possible reasons why your website’s design may be ineffective and not as engaging as you’d like it to be. To ensure that you don’t fall victim to one of these critical barriers to engaging and effective Web design, you should make sure that you’re aware of what they are to begin with.

Read 5 Barriers to Engaging Web Design now

One-Directional Scrolling with Navigation that’s Sly (and Fly)

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:33:00 GMT

Navigation is a key element in any effective web design but often it plays only a secondary role. Sure, parallax websites completely weave navigation into the design experience but some might argue it’s, well, let’s just say a little over the top for your average website – unless you’re a designer working on their portfolio.

Fortunately, there are plenty of innovative approaches to navigation that are ideal for the broader spectrum of Internet websites – e-commerce retailers, digital service providers, information publishers. And yes, there are even some specific resources available to make it look good and, with any luck, work even better.

Sly, for example, is an interesting Javascript Library from Tomas Sardyha for one directional scrolling (with item-based navigation support) ideal for those seeking a unique and interesting approach to website navigation. Sly can be used as a scrollbar replacement, as a navigation tool (during review the concept of product showcases kept coming up), and even as an interface for parallax websites.

5 Exciting Web Design Headers for Sellers

Michael Garrity — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:25:00 GMT

The Web landscape is filled with hundreds of great brands, each of which has become successful over time for their own unique reasons.

However, despite their success, it seems that the majority of the Web’s biggest and most recognizable brands tend to play it safe when it comes to the design of their websites, from the header all the way down to the footer. In fact, most of the major names in retail and e-commerce have highly efficient, but ultimately not terribly exciting sites.

As people who spend all day looking at websites, you can trust us when we say that after a while, they all start to look the same. That’s why we’ve taken the time to find some great retail websites that dance to the beat of their own drum and feature some truly awe-inspiring website designs starting from the top down. Below are five great examples of awesome header sections on some really cool retail and/or e-commerce websites.

Betsey Johnson

Sharpie

Klondike

Blind Skateboards

Essie

And a bonus (because who doesn’t love grilled cheese?)
The Grilled Cheese Truck

Look Out Below! 15 Fabulous Footer Designs

Michael Garrity — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:51:00 GMT

One of the most literally overlooked aspects of website design are footers, the area at the very bottom of a page that provides information and links to other areas of the site or outside Web properties (such as social media profiles).

All designers use this space differently. Some of them are information heavy, including “fine print” like terms & conditions or privacy policies. Other footers are used primarily for linking to other sites or pages on the site. Another popular use of footers – and something that is found on most of them – is to provide contact information, which can range from links to social media profiles to an email address and/or phone number to a brick-and-mortar address. Finally, some designers use this area as a call-to-action to entice users to signup for an email newsletter or other promotional endeavor.

How a site owner chooses to use their footer area is largely dependent on the action they want visitors to take, but it’s all moot if their footer design doesn’t catch the users’ attention, and a good design is one that is creative, engaging and in-line with the look and feel of the rest of the website.

For some inspiration, have a look at these 15 fabulous website footers:

Seed Hunter

Weblabs Solutions

Rancid

Me & Oli

The Midnighters Club

Superior Contracting Services

Poogan's Porch

Mecannical

CSS Frameworks for Responsive Web Design

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:45:00 GMT

Responsive Web design (RWD) has taken the ‘Net by storm. RWD isn’t just trendy among designers, it’s useful to ensure a consistent user experience – something of increasing important with the diversity of screen sizes today. Fortunately, there are some incredibly useful resources available (like CSS Frameworks) for designers and developers to create digital products in some terrifically exciting ways.

CSS Frameworks are essentially pre-prepared libraries which simplify standards-compliant styling of web pages using the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) language. Much like libraries for other programming and scripting languages, CS frameworks are incorporated as external .css sheets referenced in the HTML. So what are the very best CSS frameworks available to design and developers today?

Foundation 3 - Built with Sass, a CSS preprocessor, the CSS Framework offers a flexible, nestable system, multi-device compatability and more.

Responsive.GS – Offers 12,16, and 24 column layout grids with media queries for all standard devices.

960 Grid System - Based on a width of 960 pixels, offers 12 and 16 column grids, includes templates for Photoshop and GIMP, InDesign; ideal for rapid prototyping.

Gumby Framework - A pliable (fluid and fixed) framework providing support for new HTML5 elements, includes PSD layouts and an optional UI kit.

Blueprint CSS Framework - Offers an easily customizable grid, “sensible” default typography, scripts for customization.

There are of course many others CSS frameworks which are most definitely worthy of additional exploration, including:

Ingrid, YUI 3 CSS Grid, Responsive Grid System, Titan Framework

Strong Indicators for Web Jobs' Growth

Amberly Dressler — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:05:00 GMT

Desktop, smartphones and tablets aren’t the only digital properties getting a cloud makeover – online employment is too.

Elance, a global platform for online employment that helps businesses hire and manage “in the cloud”, surveyed more than 3,000 independent professionals and found that 57 percent reported an increase in 2012 income. Sixty-seven percent expect their income to increase in 2013, with the average freelancer expecting to earn 43% more next year.

"In just a few short years, freelancing has gone from a last resort option to a lucrative and fulfilling career," said Fabio Rosati, president and CEO of Elance. "As a 'Business of One', your potential is no longer constrained by where you live or the corporate hierarchy – the survey results clearly show that the online work opportunities are enormous.”

Perhaps most interesting is the survey respondents predict that Web programming and Web design freelance jobs will experience the highest and third-highest growth, respectively.

“Companies are investing heavily in Web and creative talent, signaling a shift in how businesses engage customers and commitment to growth,” said Rich Pearson, CMO of Elance. “Data from our latest Global Online Employment Report show that the new ‘Creative Economy’ is particularly vibrant; demand for creative skills such as Web design (+574 percent), voice acting (+295 percent) and content writing (+256 percent) were each up significantly over a year ago.

“While Web programming and design are our strongest categories, some of our fastest growing areas are in legal and accounting jobs, categories that didn’t exist on Elance a few years ago. The diversity of freelance jobs on Elance is pretty incredible and we love that. Any work that can be done remotely can be performed on Elance.”

The survey also reports higher productivity among freelancers, claiming 79 percent are more productive and even 70 percent claim they are happier working in this environment.

Also important to note, but not surprising, is the surge of the Millennial workforce (born after 1981) in this online freelance realm. Elance reports that this group is adopting online work faster than any other age segment.

Of those surveyed, 46 percent of Millennials freelance full-time and 26 percent have a full-time job and freelance on the side. Seventy-seven percent of this generation possess a bachelor’s degree or above.

For Elance’s full survey results, click here.

Simplifiy Web Page Reviews Among Creative Teams

Michael Garrity — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 21:23:00 GMT

It used to be that working collaboratively meant seemingly endless rounds of in-person meetings and an incessant need to keep in constant contact to ensure that everyone on your team was on the same page.

Thanks to the Web and a slew of technological and software advancements, however, many of those processes have been dramatically streamlined for improved efficiency, thus making them far less groan-inducing.

Enterprise creative workflow solutions provider inMotionNow has just released a new tool that will help creative teams improve the Web page review process for website development as part of its flagship inMotion product, a creative workflow management solution meant to “streamline and automate creative production management” and let companies get their content to market faster.

The aptly named Web Page Review Tool will capture feedback and approvals on Web page design and functionality, so when a business creates or updates a Web page (or pages), users can mark-up the design and content, but also identify and provide feedback on navigation and browser compatibility problems. All of the reports will be found in inMotion’s simple review interface.

Users merely have to type in the URL of the Web page they want tested in the application, and then creative departments can provide access to reviewers to check the page’s functionality and communicate the necessary changes. The tool itself actually takes a “snapshot” of the page, and the reviewers use this to study it, along with a link to the actual page, so that they can navigate the site in their browser to test navigation and functionality and make comments or mark-ups on the snapshot. All of this can be accessed in the interface.

According to inMotionNow CEO Rob Munz, “The ability to review Web content for aesthetics, clarity of message and navigation in one simple application, while using the native rendering of common browsers, allows design teams to get the feedback they need to confidently complete Web projects.”

The new Web Page Review Tool has been released as a built-in feature for all inMotion pricing plans.

Web Font Fun with Javascript Plugins

Administrator — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 19:30:00 GMT

When I first started working on the Web in a professional capacity, there really wasn’t much you could do to dress up your website as it related to font choice.

Web designers had little control over fonts in the past, but that has changed dramatically over the past two years as the pace around jQuery development accelerates and responsive design becomes the norm (or at least more normal).

While it’s possible to manipulate text using CSS, that method still has its limitations. As a result, many turn to Javascript to solve the inherent problems - and the results are often worth a look.

Below you’ll find several javascript plugins that can help you, the designer/developer, modify text through kerning, introducing a responsive nature and even tossing aside all convention with some quite dramatic effects.

SlabText: This Javascript plugin splits headlines into rows before resizing each to fill available horizontal space.

FitText: The plugin renders font-sizes flexible, making it ideal for use in fluid or responsive layouts to achieve scalable headlines.

LetteringJS: For those willing to make a more daring design choices, LetteringJS fits the bill.

jqsloText: This plugin is another for those willing to make some edgy design choices, as it renders an arching effect (gets bigger as you approach the middle and then tapers off) on HTML text.

jQuery Glow: The plugin provides the ability to add a glow effect to text when hovered over.

BigText: This plugin automatically sizes text to fit inside a parent element, resulting in perfectly justified alignment.

Responsive Drop-Down Navigation with SelectNav (JS)

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

There's a whole lot of interest right now on the part of both designers and those that employ them to make their digital properties as accessible as possible - meaning that they must work and appear well on desktop and mobile devices simultaneously.

As an industry we are learning how to make the most of responsive design and to our great fortune, there are numerous techniques and technologies to support this initiative. Case in point - SelectNav.js.

SelectNav.js is a JavaScript plugin that enables designers to convert their website navigation into a "select" drop-down menu (see images below). The JavaScript is used together with media queries to create a space-saving, responsive navigation for those using small-screen devices.

Inspired by TinyNav.js, SelectNav.js requires no external library, is very lightweight (only 1.5kb minified), is customizable, and compatibility with a variety of modern browsers.

The Art of Engagement: Web Design for Affiliates

Michael Garrity — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:30:00 GMT

Website design is an important aspect of affiliate marketing, where the goal is to generate as much interest as possible in advertisers’ products. The main focus of each page should be to drive users to the merchant’s site, which is a distinctly different beast than trying to establish a long-term customer.

Like most tried-and-tested methods, there are a few things that affiliates would do well to remember during the design process:

Know Your Niche
A major part of affiliate marketing is operating within a niche industry. The content of an affiliate site should always be related to the types of products that publishers are promoting, which is how affiliates are able to attract qualified visitors.

But the site should also look the part. Visitors won’t take your site very seriously if the design is antithetical to the content and products being featured. Promoting carpet cleaner on a page with a skull-and-crossbones theme, for instance, probably won't get the job done. So, before planning the design of your next affiliate website, be sure to check out popular sites within your specific niche to get a better understanding of what visitors will want and expect to see.

Get to the Point
Because affiliate sites are more about driving traffic to a merchant’s site than anything else, the quicker you get that message across, the better. First and foremost, put as few unrelated ads as possible on the page so that users don’t get distracted by elements that aren't going to help you accomplish your goals. No extra ads would, of course, be ideal. Likewise, calls-to-action, text, links, images and other content should all focus solely on driving consumers to the merchant's product.

Make sure that the site's main objectives, whether they be gathering email opt-ins or trying to get visitors to click on something, are clearly stated and obvious to users. Images and bold calls-to-action will help them stand out more than text links that can be easily overlooked. And content such as articles and video should all be kept short and to the point.

Don’t Make 'Em Work Too Hard
Another proven design tactic for affiliates is to utilize a two-column approach, with one column dedicated to content or whatever else you choose, and the other column used to advertise products for merchants. Another key strategy is to place the most important design elements in the most prominent areas at the top of the page, and try to avoid making users scroll down to have to find these items. Strong affiliate website design should focus on putting all of the most actionable information above the fold and always making it clear and distinct.

Maintain Consistency
As mentioned above, affiliate sites should maintain a consistent look and feel that is associated with the particular products and the niche that the affiliate is promoting. Your site should help sell the advertiser’s product by preparing visitors for the experiences they will have on the merchant's site. In addition to using traditional design techniques such as color and typography to match the look and feel they are after, affiliates can also use images, logos and copy provided directly from the merchant.

TEST!
If there’s one step in the Web design process that no one should ever ignore, it’s testing. This helps discover which aspects of your site users are most likely to engage with and, most importantly, how effective the design is in driving users to the merchant’s site (or the particular conversion goal). By testing, affiliates will be able to continue to optimize the layout of their site, alter the presentation of their content and ideally uncover the best design for accomplishing their goals (and making some money).

Simplicity Rules the Day for LinkedIn Design Change

Linc Wonham — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:30:00 GMT

I suppose you could chalk it up to a crazy coincidence or merely to the fact that I was in a newsletter-reading frame of mind for a change, but for the first time since I’d begun receiving them some time ago, I read this morning’s edition of LinkedIn Today that appeared in my inbox.

LinkedIn Today is the professional network’s social news product which, in my case, appears quite randomly and usually receives a quick glance if it’s not getting altogether ignored. But that wasn’t the case this morning.

In fact, I opened the email, clicked onto the site, consumed several news items and, obediently completing all of the tasks a newsletter is supposed to invite me to do, poked around the site a little while longer and read some more content from the LinkedIn blog. If we were grading newsletters on their individual results, this morning’s LinkedIn Today that landed in my mailbox would easily get an A+.

Imagine my surprise then, when I clicked on yesterday’s post from the LinkedIn blog and began reading about the new redesign of LinkedIn Today. Senior user experience designer Joann Wu writes that the goal was to “not only make the product easier to navigate, we’ve completely re-imagined the look and feel so you can get quicker access and customized ways to consume the news that matters most to you.”

She continued to say that, “One of the key design principles that drove the approach for the visual change was to simplify the experience; creating an elegant, delightful and customized experience for news consumption.”

The simpler user interface shown below perfectly combines images and text to create a blocky grid-like layout and makes it exceptionally easy to scan content. The new interface also emphasizes the user experience by making it easy to share articles with your connections throughout the LinkedIn network, and to see which connections are following and sharing certain items. Users can also customize what kinds of stories they will see with the Customize Your News tab, also shown below.

But come on, that seems like a pretty big coincidence to me. The first time I choose to engage with the product happens to be the first day I receive the completely overhauled, redesigned version. And I didn’t just skim it, either – you could say that I vigorously consumed the darned thing before spending 30 more minutes of my morning on the LinkedIn site.

And there’s that word again: simple; or, in this case, “simplify the experience.” Clearly, that’s what my subconscious mind was waiting for, a simplified social news experience from LinkedIn. And, really, that’s what all of us as Web users demand today, simplified experiences in the form of simpler, user-friendly designs. Bing’s de-cluttering of its search results pages is just one of thousands of examples in the very recent past.

Whether my experience this morning was a coincidence or not, it is definitely not a coincidence that LinkedIn Today received its new look barely two weeks after the launch of the professional network’s iPad application. The app is simple and sleek, which is the look the news feed now has, “creating an elegant, delightful and customized experience for news consumption.”

So, for LinkedIn, a smart move on their redesign that, if I am any indication, should serve the company well in the future. For the Web design community, just more irrefutable evidence that simpler design is the course we are on and the direction in which we are headed.

Use Curtain & Sequence (jQuery) for Design Inspiration

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:30:00 GMT

jQuery can do a lot of things, but it’s really just a development library. A library that can help designers do some tremendously creative things.

If you have the right jQuery plugin and can effectively balance your creative design skills with the technical requirements and usability demands, there is no greater opportunity to inspire and impress users.

But the amount of available jQuery plugins, thanks in part to its open nature and simplified development schemas, can make identifying the “right” jQuery functionality for your own site or the sites you work on as a designer a bit cumbersome.

Have no fear, because Website Magazine is here!

Below you will find two jQuery plugins that have entered into our design radar the past few weeks, and will likely (no, absolutely!) blow your mind. We also believe that these will inspire you to greater design heights, so let's get started:

Start the show with Curtain.JS

This jQuery plug-in allows designers to create Web pages with multiple fixed panels. The panels essentially unroll with an effect similar to that of a curtain rising. Users can navigate through the keyboard, scrollbar or mouse wheel. Designers can also add fixed elements or “steps” inside each panel.

Put Everything in Place with Sequence.JS

There is a seemingly endless number of jQuery sliders – but trust us, this one is different. Sequence.JS features some jaw-dropping transitions using CSS3, supports responsive layouts and modern browsers, and it even works with touch devices and has swiping functionality.

One more thing! Do you know of any jQuery plugins that others should know about? Don’t be shy, share it with other Website Magazine readers by commenting below. We’re currently assembling a list of the top design-focused jQuery plugins and, as always, we could use your help!

Thanks, and please enjoy these jQuery plugins of the day!

Different Strokes: Design Preferences in U.S. and China

Linc Wonham — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Digital marketing agency Acquity Group has released its Global Usability Study that surveyed American and Chinese consumers on their website preferences to better understand online shopping behaviors of consumers in China.

The findings revealed that both groups of consumers favored the American-style Web design over the Chinese-style design, especially on the homepage. American consumers gave the American style a 78-percent approval rating while Chinese consumers gave it an approval rating of 72 percent.

Different Web Experiences
Three Web page layouts were shown in both American-style and Chinese-style designs. Separate versions of a hypothetical e-commerce apparel site were created based on a set of generally accepted design principles for each market. Participants were asked to evaluate the three pages from each style of site – a homepage, a category landing page and an individual product detail and order page.

The American-style design featured a clean homepage with a large, branded image, limited selection of promotions and information, with little or no scrolling capabilities, and similarly structured product category landing and detail pages.

The Chinese-style site was much more information-heavy, characteristic of that market's typical retail website. Product images, descriptions and promotions were all included upfront on the homepage, with long pages and opportunities for continuous scrolling. This was consistent with the category landing and product detail pages.

American audiences tended to rate both design styles an average of 5 to 10 percent higher than Chinese audiences (75-80 percent, versus 70-75 percent), indicating that the Chinese respondents had a slightly more critical perception of Web design styles. Chinese respondents pointed out the American-style design's use of “Big pictures can drive attention, but the information was not enough”, and that the Chinese-style had “Too many product pictures on the homepage.”

Chinese respondents also noted a lack of advertised promotions more readily than Americans did, and were more frequently affected by price points.

“Creating a positive and rewarding Web experience is a complex formula of design best practices coupled with cultural preferences,” says Dominic Lee, Acquity Group’s creative director. “Although we went into the study with general cultural assumptions, the insights we collected about consumer preferences in both countries were unexpected. The cultural styles were not as easily categorized as we initially believed. This tells us that it is time to cross-pollinate the international e-commerce space.”

Entry into Foreign Markets
The point of the study was to generate analytics for marketing and IT officers as they continue to evaluate their digital channels in foreign markets. It revealed that consumers in the Chinese and U.S. markets have distinct tastes when it comes to interacting with digital channels, suggesting that marketers will need to explore new ways to merchandise a site and display product information when moving their brands into foreign markets.

“U.S. companies can save on costs by re-using designs and functionality from domestic-style home pages and landing pages, but winning over the Chinese consumer will require a product-page redesign to enhance both the quality and quantity of product information, which will likely prove beneficial to their home market as well,” says Lee. “Most Chinese companies launching in the U.S. should start from scratch with a new U.S.-style home page, but also keep in mind that U.S. consumers value the enhanced information featured in Chinese-style designs.”

The entire Global Usability Study can be downloaded here.

Typekit Now Available for Adobe ID Users

Michael Garrity — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:30:00 GMT

Popular font provider Typekit, purchased by Adobe back in October, has received an update that allows webmasters and designers to access its non-standard fonts using an Adobe ID.

Now, current Adobe ID holders are able to sign in to Typekit with their previously registered username and password. It also encourages others to take the time to sign up for an Adobe ID, making it possible for them to take advantage of Adobe’s Creative Cloud service launching in the next few months.

This also means that Typekit users can utilize Adobe ID support, which has been reflected in a recent update of the Typekit terms of use that have moved to the standard Adobe privacy policy, bringing it in line with Adobe’s traditional practices and opening the door for new features in the future.

Those old-school Typekit users who want to carry on using their current Typekit logins will be allowed to do so, although the terms of use changes will still apply.

In addition to updating the privacy policy, Adobe has disabled the use of third-party Web analytics within kits, which had been used to gather data about the “browser landscape,” as well as traffic across the various kits. Third-party analytics tools have been removed from all of the kits published after September 12 of last year.

Typekit has also announced that all night weights (and corresponding italics) of Darden Studio’s Jubilat font are now available in its library.

Ten New Joomla Extensions Worth Trying

Linc Wonham — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:30:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Joomla announced that it had surpassed 30 million downloads in its brief but, many would say, brilliant history. That’s about 8 million downloads in the past year alone for an impressive 40-percent adoption rate since the end of March 2011.

Among the biggest factors behind Joomla’s increasing popularity and rapid growth is the talented community of developers that has produced more than 2,000 new Joomla extensions in that time period. There are now more than 9,200 Joomla extensions overall, but the past few months have been particularly memorable in terms of both production and quality.

So, to celebrate the open-source content management system’s recent milestone, below is a list of 10 recently released Joomla extensions that you may not have had the opportunity to try yet:

CSS3 Image Hover Module
Added in March 2012, the module will add a CSS3 animated hover effect over an image. Simply roll over your image to reveal a title, some text and a link. With six transition styles to pick from, a color chooser and fields to enter your title, info and link, this module can be used in almost any situation to add some flair to your images.

JoomDalf
Also added less than a month ago, this magic tool is earning rave reviews right out of the gates from users. JoomDalf works with all WYSIWYG Editors in Joomla to insert column layouts, tabs, accordians, togglers, videos, buttons and just about anything else you would want on your site. Regardless of what template you use, JoomDalf can enhance your layout without any coding and just one click of a button and some simple forms to fill in.

RS Media Gallery
Added in late February 2012, this new extension lets you upload, edit and publish your pictures easily. Create galleries, modify them on the fly and publish them on your website as a collection of images, a theatre or simply as a presentation slider. Dynamic AJAX filters can be used to select the images you want to work with. Images can be published, tagged, moved and removed with no more loading times, no more refreshing the page, and all on one screen.

Josetta
Added in March 2012, Josetta is a multilingual content manager for Joomla 2.5+, designed for ease of use, forward compatibility and performance. This extension facilitates the translation of existing Joomla content in several languages by one or more translators with little or no knowledge of Joomla. Translators can easily monitor items that have already been translated and those that have not.

Form Maker
Just added on Leap Day, this form making extension allows users to set all the parameters such as colors and fonts. The size of each element of the form can be set as well, and the back end interface is intuitive and user-friendly, even for those without any scripting and programming experience.

Complete Image Styles
Added in March 2012, this extension provides a full collection of styles for images and brings together all the standard and new styles that appeared with the growth of CSS. Styles like border, shadow, rounded corners, frame, embossed, perspective, lifted corners, raised box, cutout, glowing, reflection, curves, captions and others can be applied alone or in combination.

J2Store
Also added on February 29, this shopping cart for Joomla integrates with the Article Manager and provides a facility to upload your digital products like PDFs so that users can offer these files for a price. You can now sell PDFs, images, music files and more with your own Joomla store.

jQuery Easy
Added in October 2011, this extension is meant to clean and prepare the front and back ends for the use of jQuery alongside the Mootools libraries. There is no need to add code into the template or screw around with the Joomla core, simply a quick and easy plugin for using jQuery on your Joomla site without any conflicts.

Code7 Responsive Accordion Module
Speaking of jQuery, this modern responsive jQuery extension was added in March 2012 to display articles in a responsive and good looking module. Loads in jQuery with no conflict, displays articles from selected categories and can limit the amount of articles.

Smart Slider
Also added in October 2011 and just recently updated, this is considered by many to be the perfect slider extension for Joomla. Features and capabilities include frontpage slideshow, image slider, image gallery, carousel gallery, content slider/tabs, highlighted content, banner slider, vertical and horizontal accordion sliders, product slideshow, FAQ box and much more.