If you looking for an instant facelift of your website to make it interesting and a bit more engaging, start playing with background images. For instance, use different quality images in the background and make them change randomly. Done nicely, this would really make your website interesting if not a show stopper. Playing with background slideshow is easy; all you have to do is get Vegas working on your website.

Vegas is a jQuery plugin to add beautiful fullscreen backgrounds and slideshows to your webpages. Users can easily set up slideshows with different backgrounds, transition effects and callback options.

This full screen background slideshow supports the customized CSS overlay patterns.

One of the major challenges in developing web applications for mobile is porting applications or websites to different platforms. You can port basic structure and content for most mobile devices but porting interactive elements like image galleries is the real pain. Imagine an interactive image gallery rendering without flaw on iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android and on all sizes desktop displays without requiring tweaks.

Now it is possible to create interactive image galleries for mobile and desktop platforms with PhotoSwipe. A simple JavaScript image gallery, PhotoSwipe allows you to build simple yet interactive image gallery that can be easily integrated into your mobile websites. It is heavily optimized for mobile webkit browsers with complete support for jQuery implementation.

PhotoSwipe is inspired by the iOS photo viewer and Google images for mobile. Thus, it provides your visitors with a familiar and intuitive interface allowing them to interact with images on your mobile website.

CSS3 animation is cool, engaging and practical but why use your essential system resources to render animations when you can employ hardware resources for the same purpose. This makes sense when your audience is people with smart phones and devices with relatively less processing power. Now you can achieve it with Flux Slider, a CSS3 animation based image transition framework, inspired in part by the fantastic Nivo Slider jQuery plugin.

Instead of the traditional Javascript timer based animations used by jQuery, Flux utilises the newer, more powerful CSS3 animation technology and delivers smooth animation and rendering effects by employing hardware acceleration.

Check out FluxSlider to experience hardware accelerated animation powered by CSS3… and do not forget to share your thoughts on this.

Awkward Showcase is an all-in-one content slider with all possible options that you might be looking for. It allows you to generate compact image slides for limited space as well as large sliding image show.

It also allow you to generate multiple views (compact viewline, horizontal and vertical thumbnails, full size) of sliding images without having to resize your images manually.

You can also add interactive elements in your slide show with Awkward Showcase by adding images with captions, tool tips, information as well as videos within the slider.

Remember Slides, Easy Gallery Manager and SimpleSlide that we have featured earlier on this website? These are awesome plugins for displaying and animating pictures in limited space but sometime you want to pack more features in a lightweight and simple slideshow solutions… just like Skitter.

Skitter is a feature rich and flexible jQuery slideshow plugin that comes with 22 unique and smooth animations.

It also provides various transition options like speed, interval and animation effects. Skitter offers pagination and navigation (next and previous) controls to allow users to drive the slideshow as they like.

Skitter is free, lightweight and customizable to fit in many different scenarios.

liteAccordion is a lightweight horizontal accordion plugin for jQuery. This horizontal accordion script can be used to show text, images, video – anything you can put in a div.

This horizontal accordion has been tested on the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera on both OSX and W7. It also works in IE7 upwards.

Tiny Slider 2 is a tiny(3KB), full-featured and standalone JavaScript slider, easily configurable and visually customizable using CSS. It accepts any content and gracefully degrades when JavaScript isn’t available.

Features

• Automatic rotation with the option to auto-resume
• Direction toggle (vertical or horizontal)
• Fluid motion and an elastic tween option
• Continuous sliding without rewind

zAccordion is an easy to use, fixed-width horizontal accordion plugin for jQuery. The HTML is pretty simple and can be set up to automatically rotate content / images.

zAccordion comes with number of interesting options including:

• Custom triggers
• Timeout between the slides
• Easing option
• And speed

This free horizontal accordion plugin is built using unordered list and requires minimal markup to setup and running.

An easy to use jQuery slideshow WordPress plugin that helps you create an instant image gallery for your WordPress.  With this plugin you don’t have to code anything: just write your post with the usual wysiwyg editor in WordPress and activate the slideshow, you are done.

Re-arrange the images in the slideshow straight below your post with a simple drag ‘n’ drop interface. No cut, no paste, no numbered images, no metabox. Manage and customize transitions and timings on the fly.

A nice tutorial on creating an awesome scrolling navigation using jQuery. The main thing it does differently is to have the logo and logo background elements move at different animation speeds from each other and the main content. This effect is is similar to Parallex scrolling and gives the website more interest, depth and flair.