7 Chrome Extensions That Save Web Designers Time

As a web developer, my time is often stretched between replying to clients answering phone calls and trying to find new business. So whenever I see an opportunity to optimize how I use my time and speed up my workflow I always take advantage of it. In this article, I’m going to share with you 7 Chrome Extensions That Save Web Designers Hours of Time and work.

Pull and pick colors from any web page

One of the things that I used to spend a ton of time on was trying to figure out exactly what colors to use on a website. Many times customers would send me examples of websites that they liked and color schemes that they liked and had seen online. So, I used to have to take screenshots of the websites, drag them into Photoshop to figure out what colors were being used and recommend similar ones or the same colors to use on my client’s websites. As you can imagine taking the screenshot putting it into Photoshop using the eyedropper tool to select the color to then find out what color was being used on a website was a huge waste of time. Luckily, I was able to find a chrome extension that does exactly that, the extension is called ColorZilla.

With ColorZila you can actually pick a color from any part of the webpage that you are on, another great thing that it does is that it will actually save and keep track of the colors that you have been using. That way you can always go back and check what colors you have used recently. If you are a website designer who is always having to check what color is being used on what website, ColorZilla will save you a ton of time

Taking full page screenshots

Whenever I finished a website and I was really proud of it, I wanted to show it off to the world. The only problem was that I couldn’t take a proper screenshot of it. I used to have to take a screenshot of only what was in my browser window. Sometimes if I was really proud of a design and wanted to show off the website I would scroll down and take a screenshot of each section. I would even try to crop them together in Photoshop to let people see the full website, but this would never look as good as I intended, and took hours todo.

As you can imagine I was extremely happy when I found an extension that would allow me to take a screenshot of the entire website page. The name of the plug-in is called Full Page Screen Capture. The plug-in works really great and does all the work for you, when you click the camera icon it actually scrolls the screen down for you and takes screenshots at the perfectly right time. In the end, it produces a perfect screenshot in one image of the entire website. Has an additional benefit it actually also allows you to save the image as a high-resolution PDF as well. Now, whenever I’m done working on a website and I’m proud of it I can easily take a full high-resolution screenshot of the entire page and proudly display it in my portfolio or share it with other clients and customers.

Find out what font is being used on any website

All the time when I’m working with a new client on a website they often tell me they want to use the same font they saw on another website. I used to have a really hard time either checking the HTML code or just looking by eye to try to find out what font was being used. However, I was able to find a chrome extension that can detect any font being used on any webpage and it’s super easy to use.

The name of the extension is called WhatFont. It works really easily, just click on the WhatFont icon to activate it then hover your mouse over any text and I will simply show you the name of the font that is being used then you can download the font or use that same font on your website it’s simple as that. It has saved me tons of time, and taken the guessing work out of figuring out what font is being used on a website.

Want to know if your customer has read your email yet?

When you’re running a business especially an online business email is one of the most important forms of communications. Today’s modern messaging apps have read receipts that let you make sure that your message has been delivered and let you know when it has been read. However, most email services don’t give you any information to let you know if your email has been open or read.

I remember feeling frustrated when I would send an email waited a couple of days and not gotten a reply. I didn’t know whether the client had open the email and decided to not reply or if maybe they had not opened the email yet or the email had gone to spam or for some reason they just hadn’t noticed it.

This created a dilemma if they had not opened the email yet and I sent them another message it might seem like I was being pushy or rushing them or maybe even spamming them with unnecessary emails.

On the other hand, if they had opened it and had not replied it could mean that they forgot or miss placed the email or maybe needed some more information on the product and I should follow up and see if they had any questions.

You can’t imagine how happy I was when they found a chrome extension that would solve this problem for me. The extension is called MailTrack and it works for Gmail. MailTrack is a chrome extension that lets you have read receipts on your email, it lets you know when a customer or client has opened your email and even tells you if they click any links that you sent them.

MailTrack will also remind you to follow up if a client hasn’t opened an email in a long time, for example, three or four days. One extra feature that I really enjoy about MailTrack is that it lets you know how many emails you sent each day, how many people opened their emails and what percent of the people responded to you.

This plug-in has taken all the stress and frustration out of checking my email. MailTrack is a free extension but it does offer a paid version, the only major difference is that the free extension adds an email signature that says sent with MailTrack however you can easily delete this before sending. I decided to get the paid version that does not include this sentence that way I don’t have to think about deleting it every time I send an email especially since I send tons of emails every day.

Avoid embarrassing typos

Another really simple chrome extension that is a no brainer is Grammarly. Maybe you have already heard about it since I think they did a pretty intense advertisement campaign to let people know about the plug-in. Grammarly checks your spelling and your grammar and highlights any errors in your text to let you know how you can fix it and make yourself sound more professional whenever you’re writing. If you’re like me and want to avoid sending typos in important customer emails Grammarly is a must.

Download all the images from a website a once

Whenever I am working on a website redesign I normally have to transfer the content and the images from the old design to the new design so I would spend hours pulling out the old graphics and images from the previous website. This was especially frustrating because many times my clients did not have these images saved in a separate file so I would have to go page by page on their website and save their images one at a time for the new website.

I was able to find a chrome extension that actually does all this time consuming work for me. The chrome extension is called Image Downloader. The great thing about this chrome extension is that it actually the takes all the image files on a webpage and lets you download them all together, all at once. Of course, you can also choose to just download the ones that you need.

In addition, it also lets you choose what size you want to download the images in. This is great because on some of the older websites that I have worked on clients used to upload the images in full resolution and this would make the website load slowly now with this extension instead of having to save the image resize it and then upload it to the new design I can actually download all the images and out appropriate size and import them into the new website with just a couple of clicks.

Download videos files from any website

In a similar way to images, I also had to occasionally download video files that were on websites. My clients had their videos on their website but they didn’t have the actual files with them and sometimes they didn’t even have a login to the old website. I found a chrome extension called Video Downloader Professional which automatically detects the videos on the webpage and gives you the option to download them to your computer. If you’re a web developer and your client usually have a lot of videos that you need to pull from their websites this is a great extension for saving videos from a web page.

Overall, these are seven chrome extensions that I use all the time. If you’re website designer or website developer these chrome extensions will make your life so much easier.

Our Miami Website Design Company makes over 300 websites per year, of all kinds of clients! These chrome extensions have saved us hundreds of hours, and I’m sure they will help you too!