The Build-up:

Modern websites use a lot of javascript to do all sorts of things that used to be reserved for flash; such as carousels, lighbox effects (actually called modal dialogues), fancy menu animations and other such things. We naturally spend a lot of time implementing these features as javascript adds yet another layer that has to be developed, debugged, tested, tweaked, etc. Not to mention having to make it all work in the various browsers, particularly the different flavours of IE. Every development team has a different set of tools that they use when building websites and thankfully there are a miriad of readily available tools out there starting with javascript frameworks (we use JQuery), to the effect libraries and the modules/plugins built on top of them. These packaged tools are a godsend when you need to get something done and don’t have the time to figure out how to do it from scratch. (more…)