There are many ways a website owner can choose to communicate with visitors: e-mail, contact forms, forums are the widely used ones.

ClickDesk is a live-help application that enables website owners to be in contact with visitors much tighter.

They are giving away 5*annual Lite Plans/1 agent ($120/each) to WRD readers and details of joining the giveaway can be found at the bottom of this post.

What is ClickDesk?

It is a hosted live chat system where visitors can see the online status of the website operator, choose to chat with them if online or leave a message to be contacted later if the operator is offline.

A very nice feature for customers looking for a more personal touch is the ability to make voice calls directly from the browser with a built-in browser-phone app.

ClickDesk also provides global access number in 40+ countries where they can reach you free of cost.

All these great functions (chat and VOIP) are integrated with your favorite IM application (Google Talk or Skype) which also make it possible to keep in contact with your visitors from mobile phones.

The chat can also be initiated automatically/proactively once you think the visitors needs a hand (on using your service, choosing the right pricing plan, etc.).

Once a chat is initiated, the application collects any useful information about the visitor (like chat history, browser and details, country..) that can empower the operator in helping the visitor.

Operators can chat with multiple users at the same time and/or choose to transfer chats to other operators.

Each ClickDesk account can have unlimited departments and the same account can be used in any number of domains.

It is a plug 'n' play service, just insert a few lines of JavaScript code to your website for activating the widget (whose design can be customized) and that's all. For Magento, OsCommerce, WordPress and Joomla users, plugins exist for an easier installation.

The application works as a social bar with the display of social services like Facebook or Twitter.

And, integrations exist for 3rd party services like SalesForce, Zoho, SugarCRM, Zendesk and WHMCS.

How to join the giveaway?

In order to get a chance to win one of the 5*annual Lite Plans/1 agent, you can do one (or both to increase the chances) of the following:

• tweet: "Just joined the @2desk ClickDesk giveaway at WebResourcesDepot – http://bit.ly/w3YQ5a" RT to join & win annual accounts #contest  (click to tweet quickly)
• comment to this post

Winners will be selected and announced on 23 Jan 2012 and good luck to all.

And the winners

Here are the lucky commenters for the giveaway

• Olivier (comment #497548)
• Livne (comment #497637)
• Kevin (comment #494805)
• @asacarter
• @uiliw

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining.

jQuery Rewritten, Ground-Up, for Mobile HTML5 on iOS and Android devices.

This is how jQ.Mobi defines itself and gives a good insight on what it is.

It is a fresh and open source JavaScript framework -developed by appMobi- that focuses on providing a great experience on both of the dominant mobile operating systems with a tiny footprint and code efficiency.

Compared to jQuery Mobile (24kb), it is much smaller in size with only 3.5kb (both minified and gzipped) and covers most features with the same syntax.

When it comes to speed, jQ.Mobi is impressive there as well and mentioned to be 3x faster on Android and 2.2x faster on iOS.

The framework also has a UI library (again smaller in size) and includes plugins for mobile interactions and interfaces

FeedEk is a jQuery plugin for parsing and displaying RSS and Atom feeds.

The plugin is so easy to use and can grab the feed items from any domain with a few lines of code.

Just mention the feed URL, how many items to be displayed, description and publish date to be shown or not and that's all.

There are many beautiful content sliders out there which can be easily integrated into web pages where most of them come with a default design and functionality.

If you want to create a completely custom one, Revolver.js,a boilerplate for customizable sliders is a good fit.

Revolver.js is a jQuery and MooTools plugin with an API covering the most common slider functions.

Almost any markup can be used for sliders, their designs are under control with CSS and the API is flexible enough to manage it in any desired way.

There are various transitions types to choose from, functions exist for browsing items (first, last, next, etc.) and callbacks are offered for each event.

The resource is very easy-to-use, documented in detail and has a small footprint (~4.5kb minified).

MASHA is a JavaScript utility that allows readers to highlight any parts of a web content and share it with others.

The feature is triggered when readers select any desired text and an icon appears to inform them about the feature + create a unique link when clicked.

Readers can simply click the icon, copy the unique URL generated and share it with others. When a MASHA-generated URL is loaded, the selected text is highlighted so that it is seen easily.

There are callbacks for onMark, onUnmark and onHashRead (when a MASHA URL is loaded) that makes custom events possible and a WordPress plugin exists for quickly adding this utility.

Info: The demos of the resource don't work as the source video files are unavailable.

Acorn Media Player is a jQuery plugin for creating a customizable HTML5 media player with support for accessibility.

The player can be completely controlled with keyboard (with standard tab-based navigation), has screen-reader support + accessible themes and various other accessibility tweaks.

There is also support for closed captions and a dynamic transcript generated from the selected captions is provided.

Acorn Media Player can be themed with ease, can display videos in fullscreen, informs users on loading processes with loading + buffering indicators and can even remember the volume level used with HTML5 localStorage.

The sliders (seek and volume) can either use jQuery UI's widgets or a custom one is provided as well and few other options exist (like the direction of the volume slider) for further customization.

Scrollorama is a jQuery plugin for creating eye-candy effects in parallel to the scrolling of web pages.

By dividing the content into blocks, it simply lets us to animate elements on the page (when a block is reached) based on the browser window’s scroll position.

The animations are accomplished using CSS properties, durations of them can be defined and it is also possible to set the exact scrolling positions of the start/stop events.

Building mobile web apps already became pretty easy with user-friendly and high quality frameworks

Mobjectify is a free web application which makes it so much simpler by offering an awesome web-based mockup builder.

The application enables us to create pages and add various web elements (like forms, buttons, content areas, footers, etc.) with few clicks.

It also offers multiple themes to choose from or you can create new themes. There is a live preview and results can be exported as a single HTML file anytime.

Mobjectify powers the mobile web pages with jQuery Mobile + its theme engine and only leaves the custom coding to you.

For creating a highly animated banner, Flash is probably still the best solution. However, it is not completely supported anymore; some users prefer not to install it and the popular iOS doesn't have it at all.

So, creating fallbacks for Flash banners is a very good idea to make sure you display a visual for everyone and, LazyFallback -a free Adobe AIR application- handles this process well.

By simply drag 'n' dropping any number of SWF files to the application, it generates JPG alternatives for each of them quickly.

LazyFallback is a simple application which doesn't have many setting and only 2: defining the moment of the Flash animation for fallback generation and quality of JPGs.

P.S. What would possibly be better is the ability to get animated GIFs besides the JPGs.

Swipe JS is a lightweight (3.7kb minified) mobile slider with 1:1 touch movement (sliding content based on exact touch position).

It can display any HTML content and offers a native-like experience with features like:

• resistant bounds (increased resistance to slide when there are no items to display next or before)
• smart resizing on rotation as the slider resets to make sure the sliding elements are sized right
• the size of each slide is set with the width of the container which is useful for passing different widths on responsive designs
• detecting if you’re trying to scroll down the page or slide the content left to right

Swipe is a standalone slider which doesn't rely on any JavaScript library and has few configuration options like:

• the slide to be displayed on initial load
• speed of transitions
• auto slideshow to be on/off
• and callback fired after successfully displaying a slide

Also, it has API methods for custom interactions including the display of prev-next items and getting the current position.