The limelight this month might be better characterized as a rosy holiday afterglow! Holiday sales (including auctions, automotive and travel) increased a brawny 30% over last year, according to a Goldman Sachs report. According to our own 9th Annual Holiday E-commerce Watch, the gifting process per se, from inspiration to presentation to handy email postscripts explaining return policies, is better than ever, but technical glitches were aplenty. To learn more, link to our Holiday E-commerce Watch, then look for our next Litmus paper, which contends that slowdowns, blackouts, and general pileups of people trying with only intermittent success to spend their money on your web site are NOT generally the fault of technology. We were behind several metric-blasting rich media banners, nifty holiday web site updates, and an award-winning holiday e-greeting, and hope to be behind your many successes in 2006! Happy New Year! Wexner Center for the Arts, one of the nation's preeminent cultural institutions, has completed a $15.8 million renovation and reopened its doors, both physical and virtual. As the Wexner Center's Interactive Agency of Record, we made the Center's heady lineup of events the site's protagonist, with a translucent band offering handy access to everything audiences can find OnView, OnStage, and OnScreen, as well as to Public Programs. This array floats atop a Flash-based front door view of key images and offers (including tickets on sale). A news ticker with an RSS feed allows visitors to receive news automatically on their own devices, and an improved calendar tool lets users filter programs by day, week, month, or category. www.wexarts.org. We have a big green thumb's up for The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, who included us in their biggest product launch in the history of its Miracle-Gro® brand. We built the www.liquafeed.com micro-site with a verdant array of original interactive features, including a virtual garden tour and product demo, and two main customer journeys for visitors who self-segment based on a love of gardening (and the process/hobby of it) or love of gardens (time-challenged gardeners who want results) .
	Just last week, the 2nd Annual Design Interact (part of the CommArts Network) Holiday E-Card Annual included our holiday e-greeting among 17 winners culled from hundreds of clever and whimsical entries. Check out card #16 at http://www.designinteract.com/features/ For the whole scoop on our e-greeting, "The Miracle on Front Street," from its Flash-driven front lawn animation to its philanthropic agenda, read the DM News article. Also, the Columbus Society of Communicating Arts (CSCA) Judges' Choice went to our own www.rbkrunning.com—Reebok's micro-site for running enthusiasts. The 9th Annual Holiday E-commerce Watch evaluates 20 leading e-retail sites' holiday performance. Special focus is given to their entire gifting process and their gender differentiation, the latter of which is an essential ingredient of the optimized site, according to our in-depth research initiative, Gender on the Net. For more online holiday insights, don't forget President Kelly Mooney's blog, www.mooneythinks.com. It warrants mention that when we last limelighted (not to be confused with moonlighted), Resource Interactive was chosen as one of the best places to work. This just in: we are the #1 place to work in the Small Business category, and Business First profiles our culture and our CEO Nancy Kramer. We're on a year-round safari for talented individuals who want to be part of our culture. Your referrals can be made here.