How to bring user further down the page using jQuery?

Question

When the user performs a certain action I want to bring them further down the page. Kind of like how an a-name link works. Except obviously it needs to happen without any additional parameters being added to the url or refreshing the page.

So what would be the jQuery way of doing this:

<a href="#person">Click Me</a>

<a name='person'>Tommy</a>

EDIT

a nice slide down effect to bring the user down the page would be nice too.

Answer 1

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/ScrollTo

Answer 2

Have a look at the ScrollTo plugin for jQuery. It does what you want and supports animations as well. So you could just do:

<a id="person">Tommy</a>

and use the plugin like this:

$.scrollTo($('#person'));

Alternatively, if you don't want any fancy stuff, you could do this by yourself in a couple of lines:

var offset = $('#person').offset();
window.scrollTo(offset.left, offset.top);