The watermark effect is to specify some instruction in the textbox and its very useful to the user to know about the textbox control. For example, A Web form will contains a textbox for the user to enter the Date, you can use the watermark effect on the textbox so that it always displays the date format ‘dd/mm/yyyy’ unless the user has already entered something. Watermark Effect Then add the following Jquery in Script tag and also include jquery-1.4.1.min.js file in Head tag. Code: $(document).ready(function() { WaterMark("#txtdate"); }); function WaterMark(ControlID) { var watermark = "dd/mm/yyyy"; if ($(ControlID).val() == "") { $(ControlID).val(watermark); $(ControlID).css("color", "Gray"); } $(ControlID).focus(function() { if (this.value == watermark) { this.value = ""; } }).blur(function() { if (this.value == "") { this.value = watermark; } }); }