Chrome Extensions can simplify your life in and out of the office. The right extensions can help you manage your social media, check your grammar, or give you a heads up when that game you’ve been searching for comes up on Craigslist.
Here, some of our team gives you their favorite Chrome extensions for development, marketing, and the whole world beyond the workplace.
Annie Cocchia, Design Strategist
Boomerang for Gmail – Email Scheduler
The Gmail extension allows you to write emails and send them out at a scheduled time. It will also note how "respond-able" your email is based on AI Boomerang uses (though I don't always pay attention to that).
Feedly – Content Curator
After the end of Google Reader, I switched to Feedly and the UI is great. I can keep track of my favorite blog/content sites, organize articles in custom folders, and see which content is still unread.
Robby Russell, Managing Partner
BuiltWith – Website Analyzer
BuiltWith is extremely helpful when prospecting for potential future partners. This extension provides useful details about what technology web applications are using while doing sales research – what framework their site is built with, what plugins they’re using, and more.
GoToMeeting for Google Calendar – Meetings and Calendar
This extension helps you easily schedule GoToMeeting sessions from your Google Calendar. When creating a Google calendar invite, it also generates and auto-fills meeting details into the description.
Jack Bouba, Visual Designer
WhatFont – Font Search
See a font on a web page that you like or need to replicate? This extension makes it really easy to identify fonts and determine size, color, and line height, in addition to the name of the typeface. Just click the extension and hover over the font you want to identify.
Full Page Screen Capture
This extension creates a screenshot of an entire webpage, including the parts of the page that are outside the container of the viewport. You can create full page screenshots to review or share with a few clicks, or by pressing Alt+Shift+P.
Erica Tafavoti, Digital Marketing Manager
Buffer – Social Scheduler
Whether you dabble in personal social media or you’re a full-time social media professional, the Buffer extension will speed up your social sharing. If you have a Buffer account connected to your social profiles (it’s free, unless you choose to upgrade to an Awesome Plan) you can easily post or schedule article shares with the Buffer extension.
StayFocusd – Productivity
I’m easily distracted. StayFocusd helps me block the sites that keep me from staying focused. You can set the allotted time you can spend on the site each day in the extension. So head to Twitter and choose a five minute allowance if you want to be extra productive today.
ColorZilla – Color Picker
ColorZilla makes color selection and matching on web pages simple. It allows you to get a color reading from any point in your browser, adjust the color if you need to, and paste it into another program. If I need to coordinate a Canva graphic with an icon on a web page, I can quickly identify the color and paste it in my graphic.
Brian Middleton, Front-End Developer
MozBar – SEO
You can easily track your SEO items for your website. This includes description, title, keywords, canonical tags, social sharing tags, etc. One click will give you instant metrics on any page.
CraigsHunter – Craigslist Assistant
This extension alerts you to new items on CraigsList that match a search string. So if you’re looking for a specific item, you can be the first to pounce without needing to manually check CraigsList every five minutes.
Kathryn Carr, Back-End Developer
Pocket – Content Curator
Pocket helps you curate a list of articles to read later. It's easy to organize links for both work and personal. You can sort by adding labels, there are suggestions to choose from and you can also add your own.
Olivia Halfen, Project Manager
MomentumDash – Productivity and Inspiration
Momentum shows a travel photo and an inspirational quote when you open a new tab in Google. You can also put in your main focus for the day, or even a to-do list. Perhaps the most exciting part is seeing what new photo will pop up each day. It will temporarily satiate your wanderlust from your desk.
Scott Dudley, Back-End Developer
Allow-Control-Allow-Origin – CORS Tool
This extension allows to you request any site with ajax from any source. It's super helpful in certain development cases with CORS issues, and there's a one click enable/disable. Be sure to disable the extension when you aren't actively using it, as it can clash with certain sites like Google Sheets.
Some MVP Favorites
We have a few extensions that are favorites around the office. These are staples that we use every day.
Grammarly – Grammar Assistant
If you're writing blog posts, social posts, or emails, the Grammarly Chrome extension will check your punctuation, spelling, and grammar. If you're prone to typing in a hurry (or just honestly aren't that great of a speller) this extension will catch your mistakes in real time and prompt you with a correction.
1Password – Password Storage
The entire team at Planet Argon uses 1Password. This app securely stores login information for websites, and then the Chrome extension allows you to pull in this login information quickly. If you're working with multiple companies like we do, or if you simply want to separate your business and personal information in an account just for you, 1Password allows you to group logins into "Vaults". There's also a handy password generator that will create a unique, strong password for your new accounts, then automatically save the information.
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