Visual effects represent attractive elements that make the user experience more pleasant and, at the same time, increase the degree of interactivity of any website. These effects can be obtained through various coding techniques in any web programming language server side or client side like PHP, ASP.NET or Flash, JavaScript and more.


When you have to implement visual effects into a website, the main principles of programming language selection take into account basic considerations regarding the effect complexity, time of script completion, browser compatibility issues, requirements on client side or server side and the minimal time needed by web browser for page rendering.

The easier way to add impressive visual effects to the elements on your web pages is provided by JavaScripts or AJAX scripts. Generally, for a high level of visual effect complexity, the size of the code is reduced and as a consequence the rendering time will have a low value.

This is a great advantage from the point of view of achievement of an optimal web page loading behavior. At the same time, AJAX and JavaScript scripts are supported by many modern web browsers. The next scripts allow you to make an idea about the possibilities provided by Javascript or AJAX programming language to apply various effects to images.

Image zoom effects could be achieved in different variants with or without the need of reloading the current page. FancyZoom script adds to images an animated zooming effect similar to the one included in the Safari browser functionality. JQZoom script adds the zoom effect only to a part of an image: when the user moves the mouse over an image region, the respective zone will appear magnified in a window.

Navigation through panoramic or 3D can also be implemented through the help of JavaScript or AJAX: Image 3D script permits the navigation of a 3D room with the help of the mouse and Pamoorama script shows a navigable panoramic image (actually, it shows only a part contained in a larger image and through scrolling the panoramic image effect is achieved).

Shading, glowing or bevel effect can also be applied in case of your website images: Bevel.js is an unobtrusive JavaScript example in this sense. The examples could continue, but those presented in this article should be enough to demonstrate the easy scripts implementation and spectacular effects achieved with JavaScript or AJAX coding techniques. On SOFTPEDIA, there are listed more scripts that allow you to apply various visual effects on your website elements.