Tips on taming the beast
Firefox Add-Ons for Online Marketing
The Firefox browser stands out from its competitors thanks to its community of third-party web developers, which contribute thousands of free and useful add-ons. More recently Google Chrome has caught up with the addition of many useful extensions. Among the many Firefox add-ons created over the years, here is a selection of practical value for common online marketing tasks:
- Web Analytics Solution Profiler (WASP) helps debug web analytics installations. It works with dozens of analytics solutions including Omniture, Coremetrics and Google Analytics. Paid versions of this addon are available for large scale, automated site audits. Many analytics implementations are incomplete or somewhat faulty, leading to misleading conclusions.
- SEOQuake and SearchStatus measure how well a page is optimized for search engine indexing and retrieve SERP rankings from various sources. SEOQuake 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.
- SEM Tools automates some common search marketing tasks.
- Google Global retrieves Google search results as seen from different geographies, as opposed to the default results targeting your own location. This comes useful not just for people in charge of international sites, but also when traveling or to help with local/regional campaigns.
- KGen gives word count and position information on any given page, helping SEO analysis and copywriting.
- Social Media shows how much a page has been shared has been shared over a variety of social sites such as Digg or Delicious.
- Fireshot lets you take a screenshot of a page in one shot, which comes very handy for longer pages.
- 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.
- MeasureIt is another useful tool to help you interact with designers. This plugin is a ruler to check the dimensions or alignment of page elements in pixels.
- Web Developer is a treasure trove for designers and developers. It will help you work with 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 show both perceived and actual loading speed affect online 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. Requires the Firebug extension.
- 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.
- 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.
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. Sometimes the latest Firefox updates are not compatible with older addons. Firefox will automatically pick up addon updates that can restore functionality, however because most addon producers are volunteers or small shops, patience is required as well as the understanding that some will abandon their projects.
Productivity-Improving Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts let you execute repeat tasks more quickly because your hands don't have to leave the keyboard for the mouse. While shaving a mere second might sound trivial, it does add up. 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.
You can use shortcut combinations for even more efficiency. Typing "Ctrl+T marketingcharts Ctrl+Enter," for example, opens www.marketingcharts.com in a new tab. This page has even more tips and tricks.
Browser Search Box
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:
A final note on performance
The extra functionality provided by Firefox once souped up with many plugins comes at a cost. 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, uninstall plugins you are not using, and close Firefox when it is starting to slow down your system to start from a clean slate.
