You can never underestimate how useful an accordion can be - use them for menus, featured content slideshows, squeezing more content into your sidebar; the list goes on! Making your life easier, I've put together a list of eight brilliant jQuery accordions that you could use on your site.

Dynamic Drive Accordion


A highly customizable accordion that opens on hover or click. This sort of accordion looks best in a sidebar.

Source

Design Reviver Horizontal Accordion


A very nice horizontal accordion – when you hover over the image, a caption appears. Useful for showing off a couple of featured posts if you’re tight for space.

Source

jQuery UI Accordion


Accordions can be used very effectively for navigation, as these next three examples show. This example opens on hover.

Source

Simple jQuery Accordion Menu


Another accordion that can be used for navigation. There are lots of options (not just navigation), so visit the source to see them all. This navigation example has expandable submenus.

Source

Accordion menu using jQuery


This final navigation example has two options – open on mouse-over or click.

Source

Xbox 360-like horizontal jQuery accordion


An Xbox-like horizontal accordion that would look really good being used as a featured content slideshow – an alternative to the JonDesign one that everyone uses.

Source

Simple horizontal jQuery accordion


A slightly simpler horizontal accordion that has a number of customizable options.

Source

HoverAccordion jQuery Plugin

An Apple.com like vertical accordion that opens on hover. Would look good on your sidebar.

Source

Missed something? Leave a comment with the details of your accordion!

This guest post was written by Alex Denning – take a moment to visit his sites – Nometet.com and here GreenGrassGames.com.
If you’re on Twitter, then you can follow Alex here.

Related Posts

No related posts.
 

30 Comments

  1. Posted February 21, 2009 at 1:52 pm | Permalink

    I’ve used the HoverAccordion plugin before, but Ilike the look of some of those horizontal accordions.

    Thanks for sharing!

  2. Posted February 22, 2009 at 4:07 am | Permalink

    Was looking at those sites this morning, who knew we were both thinking about accordions. :)

  3. Todd Parker
    Posted February 22, 2009 at 7:28 pm | Permalink

    You should also check out the official jQuery UI accordion. It is very mature, well-documented and is skinnable with ThemeRoller
    http://jqueryui.com/demos/accordion/

    Was this left off the list on purpose?

  4. Posted February 23, 2009 at 7:01 am | Permalink

    I just recently started using JQuery. Thanks for the great examples.

  5. Posted February 23, 2009 at 7:34 pm | Permalink

    Just amazing the things you can do with jQuery. I’ll pass it on…

  6. Posted February 24, 2009 at 6:05 am | Permalink

    JQuery looks great, thanks for sharing it, It sure adds nice features to a site

  7. Posted February 24, 2009 at 7:10 pm | Permalink

    Haven’t used before, but am going to look into it based on everyone highly recommending it here.
    Thanks!

  8. Posted February 24, 2009 at 8:47 pm | Permalink

    @Todd – er no. Just didn’t see it! Thanks for sharing it though.

    Everyone else – not many of you guys have been sharing your favourite accordions – comment below!

  9. Posted February 24, 2009 at 10:21 pm | Permalink

    I’m really having problem with this Accordion thing since I’m not that really good in programing but this really helps thanks a lot.

  10. Posted February 24, 2009 at 11:18 pm | Permalink

    jQuery is a very valuable tool that helps add more content. I like to use it to help my users have the freedom to look into other things we offer.

  11. Posted February 26, 2009 at 3:32 am | Permalink

    I have just recently started using jQuery with my website and I feel like my bounce rate is going down. I highly recommend it!

  12. Posted February 26, 2009 at 10:29 am | Permalink

    Thanks for the great examples. It very helped me.

  13. Posted March 1, 2009 at 2:08 pm | Permalink

    Thats a nice one. Thanks for sharing this tip!

  14. Posted March 1, 2009 at 3:39 pm | Permalink

    Jquery in astonishing action once again. Great examples. Thanks for sharing.

  15. Posted March 2, 2009 at 10:58 am | Permalink

    To be honest I hate jquery, I am one of those few people who still like security best and use noscript. It’s pretty annoying to see more and more wordpress themes depending on nifty shifty tools. It may enhance the users experience, but I think very often less is more :) Or at least you should code a site that works with and without scripts.

  16. Posted March 2, 2009 at 11:44 am | Permalink

    Horizontal accordions are extremely unintuitive however I realy liked the x-box one. But I don’t know if the idea would be clear enough for every guest to use it efficiently.

  17. Posted March 5, 2009 at 11:35 am | Permalink

    This are great examples. It really helped me to find a solution for a webpage. I choosed the xBox model. Thanks for sharing.

  18. Posted March 9, 2009 at 8:28 pm | Permalink

    What I have been wondering if that xbox design could lead to legal problems? At least if you use it with the same colors.

  19. Posted March 19, 2009 at 3:20 am | Permalink

    I love the way this can be done in jQuery.

    And the best thing is that as they’re just unordered lists – they’re easily crawlable by search engine spiders! :-)

  20. Posted March 19, 2009 at 9:05 pm | Permalink

    Nice one, I really want to use accordions in my next project.

  21. Posted April 1, 2009 at 3:40 pm | Permalink

    I like accordions some times but other times they get used wrong and look bad and cut down on usability. Thanks for the list

  22. Posted April 8, 2009 at 11:41 pm | Permalink

    Haven’t used before, but am going to look into it based on everyone highly recommending it here.
    Thanks!

  23. Posted April 9, 2009 at 9:52 pm | Permalink

    Fantastic. thanks for shareing.

  24. Posted April 24, 2009 at 3:04 pm | Permalink

    JQuery is awesome, but the ones posted here seem a little outdated for the web 2.0 style (reflections, dropshadows, rounded corners, etc.) I guess just a little editing of the images needs to be done to make them fit in nicely.

  25. Posted May 2, 2009 at 10:23 pm | Permalink

    this is nice post. And its good to use these kind of plug-ins. Thanks for sharing it publicly. Please keep sharing more these kind of plug-ins

  26. Posted May 13, 2009 at 7:25 pm | Permalink

    Xbox is my favourite one. Could use that one on my sites one day. Thanks for sharing these examples with us.

  27. Posted July 10, 2009 at 1:59 pm | Permalink

    but the ones posted here seem a little outdated for the web 2.0 style (reflections, dropshadows, rounded corners, etc.) I guess just a little editing of the images needs to be done to..

  28. Posted September 5, 2009 at 1:16 am | Permalink

    nice list , I really like the apple inspired vertical accordion.

  29. Posted October 24, 2009 at 10:22 am | Permalink

    jQuery UI Accordion is great :)

  30. Posted March 3, 2010 at 1:41 pm | Permalink

    Hi, thanks so much for mentioning my Simple JQuery Accordion. I have released an updated version. Maybe you’ll want to update the link. The new version is here:

    http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2010/02/27/yup_yet_another_jquery_accordi

    Thanks,

    Marco

One Trackback

  1. [...] 8 Amazing jQuery Accordions Some Accordion Scripts you might like for your next project! [...]

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Subscribe without commenting

  • Smashing Network
WordPress Appliance - Powered by TurnKey Linux