Web Host Interland Expects More Than 1 Million Holiday Visitors on Northpole.com

HostReview.com
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; 04:18 PM

For nine years, Interland (www.interland.com) customer Santa's Secret Village has been meeting the holiday needs and wishes of children, parents and teachers around the globe with a website packed full of tons of FREE holiday activities.

Found on the Web at www.northpole.com, Santa's Secret Village includes holiday stories, Christmas Karaoke, holiday recipes, puzzles, a Q&A with Santa, a visit to Elf Academy, a naughty-and-nice list, birthday card from Santa and much more. However, two of the most popular sections of the site are the letters to Santa and the critical online Santa Tracker.

On December 24, visitors can take advantage of the direct link to the NORAD (North American Aerial Defense Command Santa Tracker) giving them the opportunity to track Kris Kringle as he speeds across the globe.

Last year nearly 6 million visitors logged onto the site, with 4 million of them coming between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Barbara Morrison, general manager of www.northpole.com, projects close to 10 million visitors will find their way to the Interland hosted website, spending an average of 20 minutes on the site. Simply put, www.northpole.com offers a really good time to children of all ages.

The site does not run commercial banner ads and sells nothing; however, it does link to some of Santa's favorite CDs, movies and books on Amazon. Annually northpole.com donates a total of four million banner ad impressions to four charities.

The site was founded and is still funded by RTI, a company that provides accounting and management software to more than 1,000 fast-food franchisees, representing more than 8,400 restaurants in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Bermuda.

According to Morrison, when RTI built the website nearly a decade ago, the company's computer programmers created it so they could learn how to better use the Web. From there Santa's Secret Village grew in popularity and the website has become something that is part of RTI's corporate DNA.

Interland, Inc. is a Web-hosting and online-services company dedicated to helping small and medium-sized businesses achieve success by providing the knowledge, services and tools to build, manage and promote businesses online.