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5 of Our Favorite Website UI Plug-Ins

We’ve compiled a list of our favorite 5 most commonly used website user interface plug-ins.  These plug-ins offer easy solutions to enable more user-friendly functionality on your website.

jQuery Accordion

The jQuery Accordion is a great way to organize content on a webpage; especially if you have a lot of content that needs to fit within a limited space.  Once you’ve installed the jQuery Javascript library, setting up the accordion is a breeze.

View more at: http://jqueryui.com/demos/accordion/

jQuery Tabs

jQuery Tabs are another space-saving UI component built upon the jQuery library. As with the jQuery Accordions, you can use your own CSS to customize the tabs.

View the demos at: http://jqueryui.com/demos/tabs/

Lightwindow

Lightwindow from www.stickmanlabs.com is an extremely versatile modal window plug-in.  In addition to standard modal window features such as galleries and custom HTML, Lightwindow allows you to directly load a Flash SWF overlay on top of your current page.  This saves a lot of coding time because you don’t need to write all the object/embed code and you don’t need to create an extra HTML page to in order to contain the SWF. Lightwindow is also a great way to add content to a page when the content is too big to fit within your page template.

See more at: http://www.stickmanlabs.com/lightwindow/

Galleria

Galleria is a jQuery-based Javascript gallery that makes it easy to add an image gallery to your website. It provides a number of customization options and there is a lightweight (minified) version in order to keep page load times to a minimum.

Check it out at: http://devkick.com/lab/galleria/

AddThis

AddThis is an extremely easy way to add social bookmarking capabilities to your website.  Simply go to the AddThis website, choose the button you want to use and output the code.  Once you copy the code into your website you’re in business.

Get started with AddThis at: http://www.addthis.com