As a web designer, the browser is your home. Google Chrome is the web browser of choice for most designers because of the sheer number of great extensions that are available for Chrome. Many of these extensions can make the life of a web designer much easier and speed up certain tasks that otherwise would take up a huge chunk of your time. Let’s have a look at four must have Chrome extensions for a web designer.
Firebug Lite for Chrome
Firebug has long been one of the essential web developer extensions for Firefox. This Firefox extension alone kept developers going back to the Firefox browser even when Chrome started getting better and more popular. While Chrome’s developer tools now offer a lot of the functionality that Firebug offers, many web developers still prefer Firebug. For the ones that want to use Firebug in Chrome there is now a Firebug Lite extension available for Chrome. This extensions offers almost all of the same features as the Firefox extension, though it’s missing a few, such as the javascript debugger and the possibility to read external resources.
Page Speed Insights
This Chrome extension offered by Google helps you assess your website’s performance. As we all know, fast loading of your website is crucial for your site’s user experience. A slow loading website will drive people away before you’ve been able to connect with them. Your SEO is also affected by your website’s speed, so not only will a slow website turn off visitors, but also prevent them from finding your site in search engines. Page Speed Insights gives your site a score per page, showing how well it performs and how well optimized it is. It also gives you suggestions on how you can optimize the page’s performance based on best practices. The changes that will have the greatest impact are displayed on top.
What the Font
In past times you didn’t have much choice for fonts that you could use for the web. This has changed immensely,. These days there is an abundance of great fonts that you can use for your web designs. The correct choice of fonts is much more important for the user experience of a website than most people think. Especially if your site is displaying a lot of text, you really want to offer your visitors the best possible reading experience, which is for a good part determined by the fonts you use.
When you are browsing websites as a web designer and find a great font that you don’t know yet, of course you want to know what it is. This is where What Font comes in. When activated this convenient plugin allows you to just click on a piece of text on a site and information about the font – such as font family, size, and a preview of the font – will be shown in a popup.
Edit This Cookie
This tools solves most of the issues that you might be having with Google Chrome’s cookie manager. Edit This Cookie is a very simple but extremely useful extension that makes cookie management many times easier and faster than with Chrome’s cookie manager. You can very easily edit, add, delete, block, export and import in JSON, and search cookies.
Zane Schwarzlose is an SEO at Fahrenheit Marketing, an Austin based web design company. Zane uses the Mozbar a lot in his line of work.
