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Mark your calendar: the fair is coming! The 2019 Montana State Fair begins on Friday, August 9. It closes on Saturday, August 17. Before you pack the car and head for Great Falls, bring this information with you. It'll help you decide how to enjoy your time at the fair. Save Money Enjoy your time at the fair while you save money. Buy a Valupass now, and you are covered the week of the event. The pass includes your general admission to three concerts, Supercross, and three nights of the rodeo. It also includes your fair ticket for the entire week. If you purchase the pass before July 1, it costs $64. If you buy it after July 1, the price increases to $69. If you buy the pass and can't use it one night, you can give to your friends or family to use. Explore a Variety of Exhibits and Attractions Start your day at the fair by exploring exhibits for everyone. Check out some of the local artwork produced by adults and school children. Prepare for your jaw to drop when you see the size of some of the crops on display. Make time to visit a variety of vendors throughout the park. You can get information from your favorite community organization or even stock up on your favorite products. Bring your appetite to the fair. As you explore the exhibits, enjoy a taste of foods you only find at the fair. Indulge your sweet tooth in homemade ice cream or your desire for savory treats with a wide variety of fried foods. Spend the Night Enjoying a Show The fun doesn't end after a day of exploring the exhibits, rides, and attractions. Throughout the week there are nightly concerts and shows to entertain you. Keep in mind that many of the shows have an additional ticket price on top of your fair admission. The shows are spread out between four different stages. The Chelsea Plaza hosts Kelly McDonald throughout the week. The Rock Bottom Boys perform three shows a night on the Exchange Club Patio. If you are at The 4th Avenue Stage, enjoy the Mango and Dango theatrical circus through the week. Keep an eye out for Mango and Dango as they work through the fairgrounds as well. You may also see the Animal Cracker Conspiracy of high walkers strolling throughout the fairgrounds. The Rimrock Auto Arena stage hosts the main acts throughout the week. Opening night sees Restless Heart along with Blackhawk and Shenandoah. The next night take a trip back to the 1990s with 98 degrees. Current country fans will enjoy the music of Old Dominion on the third night. After three nights of concerts, there is a Supercross motorcycle event on Tuesday, August 13. Head for the grandstands to cheer on your favorite rider. If you would like some more traditional entertainment, check out the Yellowstone River Roundup PRCA Rodeo. This three-day event is located in the grandstands. It starts on August 15 and runs through the end of the fair. Don't forget to wear comfortable shoes to explore the fairgrounds and plan plenty of time so you can enjoy your visit. Bring your camera to capture the shows, attractions, and family fun. Image by Tracy Elizabeth via cc by 2.0

Great Falls in Montana sits at a crossroads between Interstate 15, U.S. Route 89, and the Missouri River. It's one of the biggest cities in the state, and so it's a popular place for visitors to go when they're exploring Montana's vast wilderness or if they're Montana locals who want to enjoy what a big city can offer. Great Falls also has plenty of spas and spa resorts in the area. If you want to visit one to relax or look your best, you can pick from one of these regional destinations. Linda Michaels Salon and Spa The Linda Michaels Salon and Spa is in the Westwood Plaza and is easy to access from the Northwest Bypass. The spa takes up over 5,000 square feet, and it offers just about every service you could want from a spa or salon. The salon can cut, style, texture, extend, or color your hair. They can provide manicures and pedicures and sell hair and beauty products you can take home with you. Their spa services include makeup applications, skin treatments, waxing, body wraps, and sessions with a professional massage therapist. Studio Montage Studio Montage sits right on Central Avenue between Park Drive and 2nd Street. Like Linda Michaels, Studio Montage is a combination salon and spa, and their salon services include hair styling and coloring, facial waxing, two types of extensions. You can also have a makeup application training session when you buy makeup products. Their spa services include skin care, several types of massages, mani-pedis, and body wraps. They also have a sauna and shower that's free to use for anyone using the facilities. Legacy Nail Spa This spa is in the same plaza as the Holiday Village Mall. Legacy Nail Spa focuses on manicures and pedicures, and you can get one of several treatments while you're there. The list starts with a basic nail cleaning and painting and a general collagen manicure that moisturizes the skin and cuticles. However, they also offer specialized manicures that focus on neglected hands, overworked hands, and aging and dry hands. Legacy Nail Spa can also create intricate designs on your nails, taking them a level beyond basic colors. Texture Salon and Spa Texture is on the west side of town on 6th Street Southwest, not too far from the airport. Their salon can handle any hair styling and coloring projects, and their nail services specialize in shellac and acrylic paints. The spa focuses on therapeutic treatments for various skin conditions, and the therapists can customize treatments to meet the needs of their clients. They also offer microdermabrasion, a non-medical treatment that involves polishing the skin to remove the dry outer layer. Whether you want to look good for a special occasion or you just want to relax after a long week of work, the spas of Great Falls, Montana, can take care of you. With treatments for hair, nails, and skin as well as massages and body wraps, you can fully relax at these salons and spas. Image by wuestenigel via CC BY 2.0

The Rogue is one of Nissan's most popular vehicles. The compact SUV is popular on its own because it combines the low price and efficiency of a compact with the interior space of an SUV, and the Rogue has several advantages that help it stand out from the crowd. If you're considering a compact crossover for your next vehicle, you should consider the following reasons why you should pick the 2019 Rogue. Plenty of Room While the compact crossover class has more interior space than a compact sedan or hatchback, it's still smaller than a midsize crossover or a full-size SUV. However, the 2019 Nissan Rogue has plenty of room to spare for its class, with 39.3 cubic feet to spare behind the back row and as much as 70 cubic feet once you fold the rear seats down. It's also easy to access this cargo area if you get a trim with the available hands-free liftgate. This space also comes in handy for passengers, and both rows have space to spare. Two Efficient Engines The 2019 Rogue comes standard with a 2.5-liter engine that delivers 170 horsepower and 175 pound-feet of torque. The engine uses a CVT for maximum efficiency, so it gets 26 city and 33 highway mpg with front-wheel drive and 25/32 mpg with the available all-wheel drive. You can also get a Rogue Hybrid in two of the crossover's three trims, and it uses a 2.0-liter engine with an electric motor to get 176 net horsepower, 33/35 mpg with FWD, and 31/34 mpg with AWD. Many Standard Safety Features The 2019 model year has come with a lot of additions to the Nissan Rogue's safety features. Along with old standards like air bags, a tire pressure monitoring system, and the Vehicle Dynamic Control with Traction Control System, the 2019 Rogue now comes standard on all trims with Automatic Emergency Braking with Pedestrian Detection, Intelligent Lane Intervention, a blind-spot warning with a rear cross-traffic alert, and the RearView Monitor. You can also get even more safety features on the top trims, including the Intelligent Around View Monitor, Rear Automatic Braking, and Intelligent Cruise Control. A Modern Infotainment System The 2019 Rogue comes standard with a 7-inch touch screen for the infotainment system, and this system is fully compatible with both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. This lets you use your phone's apps through your car when you plug it in, but even if you don't, you'll get a hands-free phone system and text messaging assistant. With the right package or trim, you'll also get a navigation system with three years of SiriusXM Traffic and Travel Link to go with it. The compact crossover is a crowded class, but the 2019 Nissan Rogue manages to stand out from the crowd thanks to its efficient engine choices, its standard driver assistance features, and its large interior. Combining a modern infotainment system with good standard and available features, it's no wonder that the Nissan Rogue is one of the top sellers in its class. Image by ahisgett via CC BY2.0

Why we designed a new car dealership site. In early 2017 we realized our website was not serving our customers to our satisfaction.  We set out to build a better car dealership website, and absolutely broke the mold doing so!  We built our new website out with one thing in mind.  The experience we wanted our customers to have when they came to our website.  We realized that automotive websites really lack quite a bit and are difficult to use and navigate.  There were actually too many options to navigate through the website.  So we sat down and talked about it, and thought, "what is somebody's purpose for coming to our website?".   We really only came up with three answers.  1.  They are coming here to look at inventory and to look at our cars for sale.  2.  They are coming to our website to schedule a service appointment, or 3. they are coming here to obtain financing or a car loan. How we hope our new site will serve our customers. So we moved those thing to the very forefront of our website so that traffic coming in to our site would be able to quickly and easily navigate to those sections without all the frills, without all the non-sense, without all the distractions. Second to having an easy to navigate website with easy to choose options was having and extremely fast website.  So we set out investigating automotive website providers.  We wanted the fastest website possible.  So we picked our vendor DealerOn with that in mind.  Our websites www.taylorsautomax.com and www.taylorsacr.com both load in under four seconds.  The industry average is over six seconds.  Most dealerships that we would consider our competition have sites and pages loading in the nine to twelve second range.  We wanted to get our customers information quickly and be respectful of their data.  Realizing that now over sixty percent of our web traffic is mobile traffic so the more graphics, the more banners, the more slide shows the more huge video and additional services like chat and text and services that are put on websites consume a customer's data.  We don't want our customers going through a G of data on their data plan just to look at the cars we have for sale. What makes our site better than our competitors. Car dealership are infamous for having all kinds of pop ups and slide overs and push downs and "Do you want to chat with me" and this is your third visit back with us, here is an additional $500 in trade.  All of these features are designed to do one thing and one thing only, and that's where we wanted to break the mold and be completely different than anyone else in the Automotive industry.   All of these chats and buttons to "get a better offer" or "get a better price" are all designed to capture a customer's information and take them out of their buying cycle and force them into the dealership's sales cycle.  We wanted to break away from that and add a layer of transparency so you won't see special offer pop ups on our website, you won't see someone trying to chat with you or interfere with your session on our website. What you will find is all of the information you are looking for on all of our vehicles.  100% of the vehicles on taylorsautomax.com have a price, there is no "call to get price".  We wanted to be upfront and transparent with that and make a website that wasn't designed to capture customers but make a website that was truly designed to provide our customers with the best information. Let us know what you think! If you still want to get information online or if you want us to communicate with you via email, phone or text only, or swing by the dealership all of those options are available to you on our website.  Check it out, taylorsautomax.com and let us know what you think.  We built it with our customers in mind and would love to hear any feedback you have!