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With many of my past projects, I did have trouble adding little additions to sites to help make them more user friendly. For instance, adding help text for input boxes and/or organizing text with sliders and tabs, all make the user’s visit a lot easier. Over time I learned how to add such helpful additions with jQuery, and what can I tell you, it works like a charm! However, there are many plugins out there that offer the same things, so why reinvent the wheel?

One of these libraries I’ve come across is the Hint plugin. Basically it utilizes the title attribute of an input text box and adds the show/hide functions to the focus and blur events on the textbox for you. All you need to do is call the hint function on the selected textfield. You can also select multiple textfields and call hint to add the focus and blur events as well.

Another common plugin is the Accordion plugin. With the proper DOM setup, this library can turn a plain list into an interactive list with different visual effects. It’s highly customizable with different events as well.

Of course there are many more plugins out there, and ones that complement the two plugins above. However, both Hint plugin and Accordion plugin have really made my life a lot easier when adding finishing touches on a site. Feel free to post some other helpful libraries, which may have helped you.