The Canadian House & Home website relaunch sports several new brand-able sections like how-to videos, celebrity tours and a virtual kitchen design tool, and in the first month of the relaunch, traffic has increased by 63% over the same period last year.

HouseandHome.com features photos and videos of celebrity cribs (Kathleen Robertson and Jeanne Beker, for instance), videos on recipe and decorating tips, a shopping guide, daily blogs from the editors and interactive tools like the paint calculator and virtual kitchen design.

‘We can now offer pre-roll opportunities for our professionally produced videos,’ Kirby Miller, senior VP and GM of House & Home Media, tells MiC. ‘Plus we’re building branded online tools, such as the ‘Jenn-Air stylesociety kitchen designer,’ which lets people design a kitchen online and share it with their friends.’

Nature Mix recently took advantage of the branded tools and interactive microsites with embedded video. Recent contests and promotions on the site include Samsung-sponsored ‘H&H Style Intern Search’ (175 entries, 3,176 votes), and Febreze’s ‘Decorator’s Dream Contest’ (65,237 entries).

H&H magazine and site both target high-income women aged 25 to 54, says Miller, who expects the site’s approximately 2 million annual visits and 9.7 million annual page views will double by the end of the year.