So when you go to www.mikemodano.com, you see a nice enough site, but I am not impressed with animated GIFs or Flash animation.  These days I quickly resort to viewing the source to see just how astute the designer or design agency is.  So in this case, what do I find?  Obtrusive javascript and a tables-based design.  Yikes!  Maybe I, myself, need a reality check, but I thought we were past this kind of implementation approach.  Its just too easy to build it the right way with web standards these days.

So I had to go explore which firm put this site together.  Clicking the link at the bottom of the page takes me to Nform Interative which contains an all Flash home page with a logo that is clipped in Firefox and a page entitled “temp_home_page”.  What’s more, there’s no pages to describe the agency.  Needless to say, its completely SEO-unfriendly.  Wow!  And they got the Mike Modano gig?!

This is all relevant to me because I am embarking on a freelance career where I do contract programming and website development.  I do all this with the latest trends in technology and web standards.  So, test-driven development, CSS-based designs and lean standards-compliant markup are staples of anything I would do.  But it highlights to me that we still have a long way to go because people are still building old school sites and clients are still paying for them.

Hopefully, I can articulate why my approach is better and start winning some of these clients.  Doing so will offer them bigger bang for the buck and position them better for the future.  Its too late for Mike’s site, though.

The message it gives is that the DOM Inspector is not installed…except that it was in my case.  So that was pretty perplexing.  However, Firebug itself points you to an FAQ which in turn points you to a forum entry.  The grammar isn’t great, but the basic steps are:

1. Find your Mozilla directory within your application data directory and make a backup of it.
2. Go to the Control Panel and remove Firefox from your programs list.
3. Go to the directory where Firefox used to be fully installed and remove it (the uninstall doesn’t do it for you).
4. Download and install Firefox, but in a different directory than the original installation.
5. Restore your application data if it has been removed.

Some of these steps make no sense, but I followed them blindly and it worked.  I’m pretty sure that the process can be streamlined, but since I’m up and running I’ll leave that to someone else.  Since this was hard to find and harder to understand once found, I thought I would write it up for anyone who might need to do the same thing.