5 Firefox Tools for Webmasters

I have been building websites for over four years now and in that time, I’ve tested countless tools to improve what I do or simply speed up the process. In fact, when I started, I was a huge Internet Explorer fan, so the move to Firefox was quite big for me as well.

I love Firefox for the innovation the Mozilla guys created in terms of allowing people to code plugins for their open-source browser. There are literally thousands of them out there which allow you to change your internet experience and browse the web your way.

I’ve used a number of different Firefox extensions over the years and today I want to highlight my top six and why. Hopefully you’ll find something useful that you can add to your arsenal.

1. InFormEnter

There’s nothing that bugs me more than having to fill out forms online. Whether it is my name and address for ordering something online or just filling in three fields to leave a blog comment, I get frustrated. InFormEnter takes away that problem though and gives you a simple one click option to fill in all the form fields you wish.

I personally use this for blog comments every single day (which help to participate in the community and drive traffic to my site) and the few seconds I save here and there certainly add up. You can see an example of InFormEnter in use on my friend Diggy’s site below:

2. Alexa Sparky

This is possibly my favourite extension and while it doesn’t really ‘do much’ it gives me a quick overall view of how well a website is performing. Alexa is an aggregator which gives a general view as to how much traffic a website is getting and this extension quickly shows you that information.

As I’m writing this post on my own site, I can see my traffic information in the status bar in my browser as shown here:

This is useful for finding high traffic blogs to guest post on or even purchase if you’re browsing the marketplace. It’s also good for looking a tthe top sites in your niche and determining your traffic potential if you can grow a site as big as theirs.

3. Website Blocker

I absolutely love that I get to work online from home every single day and try my best not to take the opportunity for granted. That being said, apart from the sites I love to work on, there are a lot of distractions online. Facebook, online gaming, Twitter and other sites being just a few I could name.

When you’re lacking self-discipline and find these things are taking up your attention, then Blocksite might just be the addon for you. It allows you to choose which websites you wish to block so that you can get on with your work, and then unblock them when you give yourself the freedom to mess around a bit.

4. Search Status

Search Status has been created by a company named Quirk whose staff members I have met on a number of occasions whilst in South Africa. The extension includes an Alexa rank like the Alexa Sparky plugin (which I disable because it doesn’t have the graph) but has a lot more than that.

First of all it shows a websites Pagerank which is great to quickly view if you’re looking to buy links or something of that nature. Secondly, you can highlight nofollow links on a page to see if links from a certain website will give you search engine ‘juice’. Finally, there are a number of quick links which help you find how many backlinks a certain website has which is great for checking your competition.

5. ColorZilla

This tool does exactly what the name suggestions, and while it’s pretty simple, it’s very useful. I don’t count myself as much of a graphic or website design, but I do a little bit of each now and then. If I need to match up some colours or even just change the colour of some hyperlinks via CSS, this comes in handy.

Simply select the tool in the bottom left corner of your Firefox session and then click on a colour on the screen that you would like to know the HEX code for. From there, you can edit CSS with that colour or simply put it into Photoshop as and when you need it.

Glen Allsopp is a blogger who writes on the subject of Personal Development. He covers topics such as exercise, finances, and even personality development.

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Tagged as: Firefox, Firefox Addon