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Some time ago I started a IE6 survey to figure out how many people still care about this prehistoric microsoft browser. The outcome is pretty clear! Most webproductblog readers think that it is no longer necessary to support Microsoft´s old Internet Explorer 6.

The participants of the IE6 survey had the option to choose between the following 4 Answers for the question:

“Do you think IE6 support is still necessary?”

And this is the outcome:
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Whether you are a soccer fan or not: You may have noticed that there is the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa! Twitter already had to struggle with a huge traffic due to soccer fans tweeting like crazy about recent matches and the Vuvuzela trumpets - But what impact will have the Soccer World Cup for your site´s traffic?

soccer & web analytics

If your business model is not directly related with soccer and your target markets are in countries that participate in the World Championship you will very likely see traffic drops during the important soccer matches.

To quickly measure this you can do a hourly traffic analysis with your Google analytics.

With just 6 simple steps you are able to figure out how the FIFA World Cup affected your websites traffic:

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In the last blog post “Google Chrome vs. Mozilla Firefox” I explained why I now prefer the Google Chrome internet browser for private use. After more than one month of intensive usage of Google Chrome I want to present my favourite chrome extensions that are currently installed on my Chrome (BTW: I can´t notice any decrease of performance, no matter how many chrome extensions I have activated!)
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There is a browser that gets more and more market shares: the Google Chrome Browser! And even fellow Firefox fans (like myself) are starting to use Google Chrome recently. But why?
Let´s start with the advantages of both browsers.

Things that I really like in Google Chrome:

• It is really fast: loading new pages or opening a chrome browser window is definitely fast.
• It is still fast even after adding dozens of Chrome Extensions!
• The Google Chrome User Interface is very simple and not polluted with unnecessary features that you don´t use regularly

Cool minimalistic Chrome User Interface: Everything that you need in a very small space: Tabs, back buttons, Refresh Button, URL field and Extension Icons on the right.

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Well, it is not the first time this question got asked, but still many people struggle with the question Should I still support IE6 !?! Every webdesigner that has ever tried to develop a cutting edge website that still works with the old Internet Explorer 6 knows: The development of IE6 compatible designs is a pain in the ass!

Facebook has its opinion about IE6...

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Discussions and articles about user experience are usually focused on user interface design, usability etc. That is for sure very important, but the best user interface is worth nothing if your page speed performance is very poor!

Firebug Screenshot - Web users are buzy and impatient and every millisecond counts. Well, unfortunately the big search engines don´t have unlimited time to spend while crawling your page, too.

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The end of the year is always a good time to look back and remember the most special moments of the year. One of this special moments was a strange conversation that I had with a domain registration service.

Email screenshot

Well, registering a domain is not that spectacular…  but this conversation that I had earlier this year with a domain registration service provider sales dude is just too weird!

In theory it all could have been so easy: I send an Email Here is my data - Wanna domain please and an answer alright, here you go: … …2 Emails and that´s all! read more »

Advanced Google Search techniques are very useful to analyze competitors or identify sites that stole your content! Also from time to time it is a good thing to check what is going on with your website´s Google index. For the case that your website has just few pages in the index that is pretty easy: you do a site:yoursite.com query and you can see all your pages in the index and check them one-by-one.

Lots of pages in the Google index!

BUT what if your site has (approximately) hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages in the Google index?
… Well, you will need a looot of patience or even better: You will have to use advanced Google Search Techniques - and that is what this post will be about, so hang on read more »

You want to upload a bunch of new features and some bug-fixes to your site? Great! You want to avoid nasty side-effects and make sure that it works the same way like it was planned before? …then you will have to do a lot of testing!

Opening new pages with old browsers like IE4 can be fun :-)

Basically this Quality Assurance Phase should take place 2 times:

One time in a test-environment before the deployment to the production server and once again after the new web is live!

To maximize the efficiencies of your testing take care not to do the following mistakes that might lead to wrong observations, unnecessary time-waste or you will end up in overlooking faults:
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There are a lot of recommendations for product management books available in the web, but I think the most valuable pm book reviews are the ones written by product managers.

image by suchitra prints

Before you run to the library or the bookstore to buy your next book I recommend to take a look at the opinions of experienced product managers.

See below my favorite resources for product management related literature. It contains only reviews and recommendations written by very experienced product managers: read more »

It is always very interesting to take a look at the keywords that your visitors used in their Google search to find your website - and not only to analyze the SEO performance of your website. Some keywords actually can tell you quite a lot about what your visitors were really looking for on your site. read more »

I just can´t blog here about everything that might be of interest for Web Product Managers - Yes, I am not omniscient and only part-time blogging here Therefore here goes a list of blogs that recently catched my attention. They all write about for Web PMs relevant topics like User Experience Design, Social Media, Web Analytics, SEO, Online-Marketing and more. read more »

Effective Web Product Management needs to be agile! That can actually be quite hard in practice, but don´t worry the following three presentations will be a useful resource for agile product development teams: read more »

It is just strange that there are still so many pages with horrible webdesign online. Well, at least it inspired me to publish a list of my “favourite” (or better said: “most annoying”) user experience nightmares. Please also check the references to other webdesign-experienced bloggers that have a similar point of view: read more »

There are some very important interferences of SEO (search engine optimization) with the web product management that you need to know before developing your new product. No matter if you think about hiring (external) SEO consultants once the website is online, there are some aspects of SEO that you will have to keep in mind right from the start of creating an online product strategy. read more »

Some days ago I posted an interesting job. Currently there is also the following Product Management Position in our team available. If you are interested, please send your CV to jobs@migoa.com. read more »

My current employer nuroa is looking for an experienced sales manager and I thought you might be interested. See below the job profile! You are the right one for this job? Then do not hesitate and send us your CV to: jobs@migoa.com read more »

Yes, the PM workdays can be hard sometimes: Somehow the Product Manager is involved in everything and the danger to become more a “Firefighter” than a Product Manager is high! (And in the work contract it says “Product Manager” not “Firefighter“, doesn´t it?) Anyway, whenever you have the feeling that the release cycles get shorter and shorter while the to-do-list gets longer and longer, you should try the following: read more »

Twitter is a really powerful tool to get in touch with other internet people. In the last time I was looking for web analytics experts in Twitter and found an excellent resource at the Blog of Rich Page. Even more interesting people I found while doing searches in Twitter and Google. Please let me know If I missed somebody in this list and tweet me. I want to keep this list up to date and I will update it from time to time.

Web Analytics Experts in Twitter:

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In my opinion it happens too often that these important web analytics terms get mixed up or misunderstood. Sometimes even people that work in the internet industry seem to get confused. Whenever you have doubts if your conversation partner understood these terms right, you should better explain these differences again! See below the official definitions, where i have marked the parts with [!] that are in my experience most often misunderstood. read more »