Packt+ | Advance your knowledge in tech

You're reading from jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide Second Edition

Product typeBook

Published inJul 2014

Reading LevelBeginner

Publisher

ISBN-139781783284535

Edition1st Edition

Languages

JavaScript

Tools

jQuery

Concepts

Web Design

Author (1)

Natalie Maclees

Chapter 3. Making a Better FAQ Page

The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page has been a mainstay of all types of websites since the dawn of the Web. It's used as a marketing page, as an attempt to reduce the number of calls or e-mails to a customer service department and as a helpful tool for site visitors to learn more about the company or organization they're dealing with or the products or services they're interested in purchasing.

Though we'll be building an FAQ page, for this example, the expand and collapse techniques will be useful in many different situations—a list of events with event details, a listing of staff or members with bios, a list of products with details—any situation where a listing of items should be quick and easy for site visitors to scan, but where more information should be readily and easily available upon demand when they find the thing they're looking for.

In this chapter, you'll learn:

How to traverse an HTML document with jQuery
How to show and hide elements...

Marking up the FAQ page

We'll get started by taking some extra care and attention with the way we mark up our FAQ list. As with most things that deal with web development, there's no right way of doing anything, so don't assume this approach is the only correct one. Any markup that makes sense semantically and makes it easy to enhance your list with CSS and JavaScript is perfectly acceptable.

Time for action – setting up the HTML file

Perform the following steps to get the HTML file set up for our FAQ page:

We'll get started with our sample HTML file and associated files and folders, like we set up in Chapter 1, Designer, Meet jQuery. In this case, our HTML page will contain a definition list with the questions inside the <dt> tags and the answers wrapped in the <dd> tags. By default, most browsers will indent the <dd> tags, which means the questions hang into the left margin, making them easy to scan. Inside the <body> tag of your HTML document, add a heading and a definition list as shown in the following code:
```
<h1>Frequently Asked Questions</h1>
<dl>
  <dt>What is jQuery?</dt>
  <dd>
    <p>jQuery is an awesome JavaScript library</p>
  </dd>

  <dt>Why should I use jQuery?</dt>  
  <dd>
    <p>Because it's awesome and it makes writing JavaScript faster and easier</p>
...
```

Time for action – moving around an HTML document

Perform the following steps to move from one element to another in JavaScript:

We're going to keep working with the files we set up in the previous section. Open up the scripts.js file that's inside your scripts folder. Add a document ready statement, then write a new empty function called dynamicFAQ, as follows:
```
$(document).ready(function(){
});

function dynamicFAQ() {
  // Our function will go here  
}
```
Let's think through how we'd like this page to behave. We'd like to have all the answers to our questions hidden when the page is loaded. Then, when a user finds the question they're looking for, we'd like to show the associated answer when they click on the question.
This means the first thing we'll need to do is hide all the answers when the page loads. We can do this just like we did with the tab exercise in the Chapter 2, Enhancing Links. Get started by adding a class jsOff to the <body> tag, as follows:
```
<body class="jsOff">
```
Now...

Sprucing up our FAQ page

That was so easy, in fact, that we have plenty of time left over to enhance our FAQ page to make it even better. This is where the power of jQuery becomes apparent—you can not only create a show/hide FAQ page, but you can make it a fancy one and still meet your deadline. How's that for impressing a client or your boss?

Time for action – making it fancy

Perform the following steps to add some fancy new features to the FAQ page:

Let's start with a little CSS code to change the cursor to a pointer and add a little hover effect to our questions to make it obvious to site visitors that the questions are clickable. Open up the styles.css file that's inside the styles folder and add the following bit of CSS code:
```
.jsOn dt {
  cursor: pointer;
}

.jsOn dt:hover {
  color: #ac92ec;
}
```
We're only applying these styles for those site visitors that have JavaScript enabled. These styles definitely help to communicate to the site visitor that the questions are clickable. You might also choose to change something other than the font color for the hover effect. Feel free to style your FAQ list however you'd like. Have a look at the following screenshot:
Now that we've made it clear that our <dt> elements can be interacted with, let's take a look at how to show the answers in a nicer way. When we click on a question to...

We're almost there!

jQuery made animating that show and hide so easy that we've still got time left over to enhance our FAQ page even more. It would be nice to add some sort of indicator to our questions to show that they're collapsed and can be expanded, and to add some sort of special style to our questions once they're opened to show that they can be collapsed again.

Time for action – adding some final touches

Perform the following steps to add some finishing touches to our FAQ list:

Let's start with some simple CSS code to add a small arrow icon to the left side of our questions. Head back into style.css and modify the styles a bit to add an arrow as follows:
```
.jsOn dt:before {
  border: 0.5em solid;
  border-color: transparent transparent transparent #f2eeef;
  content: '';
  display: inline-block;
  height: 0;
  margin-right: 0.5em;
  vertical-align: middle;
  width: 0;
}

.jsOn dt:hover:before {
  border-left-color: #ac92ec;
}
```
You might be wondering about this sort of odd bit of CSS. This is a technique to create triangles in pure CSS without having to use any images. If you're not familiar with this technique, I recommend checking out appendTo's blog post that explains pure CSS triangles at http://appendto.com/2013/03/pure-css-triangles-explained/.
We've also included a hover style so that the triangle will match the text color when the site visitor...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to set up a basic FAQ page that hides the answers to the questions until the site visitor needs to see them. Because jQuery made this so simple, we had plenty of time left over to enhance our FAQ page even more, adding animations to our show and hide phenomenon for the answers, and taking advantage of CSS to style our questions with special open and closed classes to communicate to our site visitors how our page works. And we did all of that with just a few lines of code!

Next, we'll learn how to build an interactive drop-down navigation menu.

The rest of the chapter is locked

You have been reading a chapter from

jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide Second Edition

Published in: Jul 2014Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781783284535

A free Packt account unlocks extra newsletters, articles, discounted offers, and much more. Start advancing your knowledge today.

undefined

Unlock this book and the full library FREE for 7 days

Get unlimited access to 7000+ expert-authored eBooks and videos courses covering every tech area you can think of

Start free trial

Renews at $15.99/month. Cancel anytime

Author (1)

Natalie Maclees

contacted on 10 may '16 _______________ Natalie MacLees is the founder of Purple Pen Productions (purplepen.com), an interactive agency based in Los Angeles, California. She has been designing websites since 1997 and is a passionate advocate of both accessibility and usability. She loves teaching and sharing her knowledge, both in seminars and workshops and also with her clients. She discovered WordPress a few years ago as a flexible, extendable, and quick way to build robust websites that clients could manage on their own. She is the organizer of the Southern California WordPress Meetup Group. She is also a Google Analytics Qualified Individual.
Read more about Natalie Maclees

Personalised recommendations for you

Based on your interests and search pattern

Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development

Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development covers everything a frontend developer or a Drupal developer needs to know about the Drupal 10 theme layer. Using real-world examples, this book will help you to build up from an empty theme to a fast, responsive, maintainable, and accessible Drupal website in both monolithic and decoupled ways.

BookAug 2023360 pages4

Full Stack Development with Spring Boot 3 and React

Full Stack Development with Spring Boot 3 and React contains a wealth of practical guidance for picking up full stack development. The step-by-step exploration of everything from dependency injection, ORM with Hibernate, and JWTs to RESTful APIs, UI styling, and TypeScript will help you to develop the Spring Boot and React skills you need.

BookOct 2023454 pages5

Modern API Development with Spring 6 and Spring Boot 3

This practical guide teaches inexperienced Java programmers and web developers how to design, develop, test, and deploy highly scalable and maintainable APIs using REST, gRPC, GraphQL, and reactive programming paradigms with Java and Spring Boot. Complete with real-world examples, it will guide you to build enterprise-level APIs and services.

BookSep 2023494 pages1

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python

This book guides you to discover and extract quality data from the web using Python libraries such as requests, lxml, pyquery, scrapy, and to use effective scraping techniques. It’ll help you master the fundamentals and advanced concepts of web scraping and apply your skills to real-world data extraction tasks, with analysis and visualization.

BookOct 2023324 pages

Mastering Blazor WebAssembly

Mastering Blazor WebAssembly is a comprehensive, practical guide that’ll help you to develop advanced web applications. By combining real-world experience with the thorough knowledge needed to build Blazor apps in a masterful fashion, this book enables you to efficiently manage cross-platform mobile development with .NET MAUI and Blazor.

BookAug 2023370 pages4

Mastering Blazor WebAssembly

Mastering Blazor WebAssembly is a comprehensive, practical guide that’ll help you to develop advanced web applications. By combining real-world experience with the thorough knowledge needed to build Blazor apps in a masterful fashion, this book enables you to efficiently manage cross-platform mobile development with .NET MAUI and Blazor.

BookAug 2023370 pages3

Full Stack Web Development with Remix

Unlock the power of the web platform and cutting-edge technologies for your React applications using Remix to take advantage of the full stack to create a great user experience. This book is a complete resource covering the conventions, levers, and primitives of Remix and illustrates concepts through a real-world project.

BookNov 2023318 pages

Real-World Svelte

This book is a must-have guide to unlocking Svelte's true potential. You’ll learn about advanced component development, efficient coding, and powerful UI patterns using actions. With a focus on state management, custom stores, and renderless components, this book equips you to build exceptional web apps with lightning-fast performance.

BookDec 2023282 pages3

Building Micro Frontends with React 18

This book is a step-by-step guide to building production-grade, highly scalable, and performant web apps using multi-SPA and micro apps patterns, where you’ll learn to deal with complexities related to micro frontends. The book is a full life cycle guide to building, deploying, and managing micro frontends in a cloud-native environment.

BookOct 2023218 pages

Drupal 10 Masterclass

This all-in-one guide helps you get up and running with building Drupal applications using the latest Drupal 10 features. You’ll develop a complete practical understanding of Drupal frontend, backend, architecture, content management, themes, and modules to deliver a rich user experience by creating custom Drupal apps.

BookDec 2023310 pages

Full-Stack Flask and React

This book teaches you how to build simple yet efficient production-ready web applications. Starting with an introduction to React, this book will equip you with deeper knowledge of Flask and React technology stacks to undertake web application development with confidence.

BookOct 2023408 pages5

Full-Stack Flask and React

This book teaches you how to build simple yet efficient production-ready web applications. Starting with an introduction to React, this book will equip you with deeper knowledge of Flask and React technology stacks to undertake web application development with confidence.

BookOct 2023408 pages2