Tips on taming the beast
Firefox Add-Ons for Online Marketing
Firefox is unique among modern web browsers in that it has a community of third-party web developers, which contribute thousands of free and useful add-ons.
Here is a selection of add-ons of value to marketing efforts:
- Web Analytics Solution Profiler helps debug web analytics installations. It works with dozens of analytics solutions including Omniture, Coremetrics and Google Analytics.
- NoScript lets you decide whether to run Javascript or not on a given page. This contributes to a more secure browsing experience and can also be used to find out to what extent Javascript in necessary on your company's site. 10 percent of web users cannot or will not execute scripts, so you might identify critical functions (say, a shopping cart or sign-up form) that don't work properly when scripts are disabled.
- SEOQuake measures how well a page is optimized for search engine indexing. It has two main features: a toolbar overlay for specific pages, and information that directly integrates in search engine result pages (SERPs). Each can display custom parameters, including Google PageRank or number of indexed pages by various search engines.
- ColorZilla brings a color picker and other color-related features to your browser. Next time you talk to a web designer about colors that you like, you can provide exact RGB codes instead of struggling to describe them.
- Web Developer is a treasure trove for designers and developers. It will teach you the language of your site production team and enable you to gauge whether your site is printer-friendly, among other things.
- YSlow reports technical information about a page's loading time and describes how it could be better optimized. Studies and experience suggest both perceived and actual loading speed affect web conversion. Yslow is based on best practices developed by Yahoo — not all recommendations apply to all sites — but it can be an invaluable tool for pinpointing a site's performance.
- PDFDownload gives you a choice of downloading, opening or seeing PDF files as HTML.
- Update Scanner keeps track of page updates that cannot be monitored via an email newsletter or RSS feed.
- Resizable Text Area saves you from the aggravation of typing text into extra small web form fields.
For security reasons, download Firefox extensions only from sources you trust, like the official add-on repository hosted by Mozilla. Firefox checks for add-on upgrades every time it restarts.
Productivity-Improving Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts let you execute repeat tasks more quickly because your hands don't have to leave the keyboard. Here are some Firefox shortcuts worth knowing:
- Ctrl+T opens a new tab (Replace Control with Command on a Mac)
- Ctrl+W closes a tab
- Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down navigate through tabs
- Ctrl+L selects the address bar
- Ctrl+K selects the search box
- Ctrl+H opens the history sidebar
- Ctrl+Enter completes a domain name with .com
Basic keyboard shortcuts:
- Ctrl+F opens the Find window.
- Ctrl+Q closes your current program.
- Ctrl+C, V and S respectively copy, paste and save a selection of text.
Learning to type combinations of shortcuts adds still more time to your day. Typing "Ctrl+T marketingcharts Ctrl+Enter," for example, opens www.marketingcharts.com in a new tab.
The Google search box in the top right corner of your browser can also be customized.
Such search plugins used to be proprietary to Firefox, but the OpenSearch standard is now supported in Internet Explorer and Safari. Search-intensive destinations, like ecommerce sites, may consider offering such a plugin.
Other search plug-ins:
Most of this How-To has been devoted to Firefox, which in most cases can prove invaluable to web marketers. Here's the caveat: After a long multi-tab session, Firefox can consume hundreds of megabytes of memory and slow down a computer significantly. For this reason, make sure you don't keep too many browser windows open at once. And always shut the program down at the end of the day.
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