Mark and I decided to drive up to Grandad Bluff before leaving La Crosse.  It was a beautiful, clear day so we knew that we would be able to see really far.  Grandad Bluff is the highest point in La Crosse in which you can see most of the city.  It was definitely a place to go if you are ever in La Crosse.

On the way down we were driving with the windows open.  All of a sudden something hit Mark's head.  He looked in the back seat and it was a bee.  We had to stop to get the bee out of the car and luckily it didn't sting either of us.  What are the chances that something (bee, bird, etc.) will make it into a car through the window while the car is going around 30-50 miles per hour?

Click this sentence for all of the Grandad Bluff pictures.

Jeff's birthday was last week so we celebrated while we were in La Crosse.  He decided that he wanted to go to Red Lobster for dinner.  We had bought a cake for after dinner but since everyone was stuffed we had it the next morning. 

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Now that Jeff has a full time job he decided to get a new apartment.  It is close to his school apartment so he is used to the area and it's not too far from where he works.  It's a one bedroom, one bath, second floor apartment.  It's in a really nice apartment complex which includes three different apartment buildings.  He has secure access and if he chooses underground parking.

We went to La Crosse to help Jeff move in and were able to give him a lot of the old stuff that we had.  Along with the few things he bought with his graduation money and the items that we brought and his parents brought, he is pretty settled into his new apartment. 

Click this sentence for all of his apartment pictures.

Today we went to my Uncle Steve and Aunt Lila's house.  They live in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin which has a Jelly Belly Factory.  We decided to take advantage of being there so we went on the free tour. 

The tour wasn't quite what we thought it would be but was still fun.  We got three bags of belly flops which are jelly beans that don't look perfect.  Photos are not allowed during the tour so that is why we don't have many.  I did sneak a picture of the big jelly beans on the ceiling though. 

After the tour, we went to Steve and Lila's house where Lila had made some Filipino food.  It was amazing!!!  She made egg rolls, marinated steak on a stick, and another Filipino dish that I cannot remember the name of, but it was pork, veggies, and really thin noodles.  Unfortunately, we weren't able to stay very long because we had some things we needed to get done around the house before going back to work tomorrow. :(

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We decided to take my family on a hike on the river walk near Riverside Park.  We waited until evening so the weather was nice and actually the mosquitoes weren't too bad since we weren't in the woods. 

Along the river walk there are sculptures that I think were donated by different individuals throughout the area.  We didn't walk the whole thing but we did put in about 2 miles.

I tried to get some pictures of flowers (they might be weeds but I liked them) and other plants just to practice taking pictures.  If you look closely you can see the bee on the yellow flower.

Click this sentence for all of the pictures.

My mom, sister, and aunt are visiting for a few days.  Tonight we went to the Port Washington Maritime Festival.  We had never been to Port Washington so it was a new experience for all of us.  We were going to go this afternoon but after the farmer's market we decided it would be better this evening because of cooler weather. 

It turned out to be beautiful weather and the sun started to set so we tried to get a few neat pictures.  We walked along a small rock walkway thinking that we would make it to the lighthouse.  When we got close to the end we realized that we had to go a different way to get to the lighthouse. 

Click here for all of the pictures.

Everyone at work told me that we had to go to the Wisconsin State Fair, so I forced Mark to go and we had a lot of fun.  The pictures don't show enough of the fair but we walked around and didn't feel like a lot of the things to do were picture worthy. 

One example is the Exposition (EXPO for Wisconsinites) Center, in which they have "live infomercials."  We were very tempted to buy the ShamWow! but resisted the urge to throw away our money.  Even though it appeared to work.

We were able to meet up with two of my co-workers so that was nice for Mark to finally meet them.  We ended up eating lunch with Lisa and her family and just chatting with Alicia and her kids for a little while before we left. 

Friday at work, one of the ladies had extra cream puffs and Lisa mentioned to her that I had never had one before.  So she gave me one for Mark and I to try.  For those of you that don't know, cream puffs are a must at the Wisconsin State Fair.  They even have a drive through area for people to pick them up if they can't stop by the fair that day!!  It was not bad, but I would much rather have a chocolate chip cookie or some other sweet treat. 

For those of you that read Three Little Rusts, you know that I mentioned that the State Fair had many foods on a stick, including mac n' cheese.  Unfortunately we didn't even see the booth that had them so I couldn't take any pictures.  I was curious to see how they made it.

We were able to see the pig races that I was told was a must.  It was pretty cute and they even had ducks and goats race as well.  We also saw a diving dog, livestock, and we rode the sky glider.

Here are all of the pictures that we took.

We decided that we would try hiking again, but didn't get very far.  Bug spray helps a little but we still walked out of Lac Lawrann with bites.  The pictures make it look darker than it really was.  I can't wait to be able to explore the whole park without running from mosquitoes.

Although web standards have been thrown to the wayside in the past, more and more people are seeing the benefits of adhering to them.  I am going to outline what web standards are and how they can be beneficial to you.

What are web standards?

In 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was created to provide guidelines for web developers and the technologies that they use.  The W3C currently has around 450 member organizations, including, a big surprise here, Microsoft.

The W3C develops de facto standards to improve the way web related products interoperable between one another.  The groups within W3C try to gain consensus from all of the members of the organization, put together working drafts, and propose recommendations.  This process has been very successful at keeping standards relevant as well.  The usage and creation of web sites and content are very different than even 5 years ago.

How will I benefit from adhering to standards based design?

Faster load time for web pages

When you cut out all of the extra unneeded markup and redundant styling information, your pages load much faster and put less load on the server.  This will make your users extremely happy by improving load times.  No one likes a slow website.  They will just go to another competitor or a better site.

Simplified update of look and feel

Instead of changing code on every page of your site, you can easily change the entire look and feel of your site easily by using cascading style sheets (CSS) and changing only one file.  This ability has certainly changed web development forever.

Increased separation of code and content

Instead of adding styling code and other non standard code into your standard markup, you can take all styles information and dimensional information and pull it out into stylesheets, therefore making both your styling and HTML markup much easier to read and modify.

Decrease bandwidth and the space needed on your server

By taking out redundant code and repetitive styling information, you can drastically reduce the size of your site.  This is instrumental in very large sites that have thousands and thousands of pages.

Improved accessibility to all browsers and other Internet devices

You want to hit the largest audience possible, and by adhering to standards you will be doing that.  This is especially important for individuals with disabilities.  It is much easier for screen reader technology to read through content if there are not extra tags and styling information inline in the page.

Adhering to standards lowers costs

This one ties into almost all of the prior reasons.  You save money on servers because of less bandwidth costs, your code is easier to maintain, and updates are faster.  You will save money by following standards.

I hope that you call can see the benefits of adhering to web standards and start using it in your site.  It becomes second nature when you start using them.

I could have added a top 10 list, but really there are 2 major things that improve how well your site does in a search engine.  In the past, web developers would use any means necessary to get their results at the top of the list, know as "Black Hat Search Engine Optimization."  This would include repeating phrases, or creating invisible text to try to game search engine relevancy.  These days, search companies like Google have gotten more intelligent in the way they index content and determine relevancy of content.

Google has a ranking system called Page Rank that uses extremely complex algorithms to determine relevancy.  Although they will not give away too many details of their algorithm (for fear of everyone gaming the system), they do give you guidelines to improve your site to make it more search engine friendly.

Quality Content

Cut the fluff, and write quality content for your site.  A lot of web design companies are guilty of adding fluff to their content and also to their client's content.  People want to read about your product or service, not read every buzz word known to man.  Search engines care about the quality of your content, and how it can help others to increase their knowledge as well.  Fluff and marketing mumbo jumbo does not do that.

Referral Links

Your site looks pretty darn important when thousands of sites are linked to your content.  Search engines see these links and determine your content as very relevant to a large number of people, hence see it as quality content.  Social networking sites are so incredibly successful because they have tons of links, and thousands of people link to them.  

There are hundreds of other factors that can affect your site's search engine results, but I thought I would mention the top 2 that really matter to companies like Google.  Change these 2 things, and you will see yourself increasing your relevancy to search engines, improving your search engine rankings, and ultimately driving more traffic to your site.

I hope you enjoyed this brief SEO article.