agu.nn.ru — the site of the Nizhny Novgorod online store of children's goods “Agu” (a Russian baby's babble, the equivalent of “goo-goo”). The store took orders over the network and delivered them around Nizhny Novgorod by courier; in working order it has been preserved in the web archive as a single snapshot — 12 November 2004[1]. That same snapshot is also the earliest one in the archive; the last is dated 5 September 2010, but by that time the address already served a hosting provider's service stub[3].

What the site looked like

The only snapshot of the working store available to us was made on 12 November 2004; the date on the home page itself is 26 October 2004[1]. The top menu consisted of the items “About the company”, “Search”, “For children”, “For the home”, “Cosmetics” and “Cart”[1].

The “For children” section was divided into diapers, baby food (with separate headings for formula, cereals, purées and juices, as well as teas and water), “everything for feeding” and children's cosmetics. The “For the home” section brought together laundry detergents; shampoos, soap and gels; cleaning and washing agents; personal hygiene products; toothpastes and toothbrushes[1]. There are no toys, clothes or strollers in the list of sections: the range was built around food and hygiene.

The home page opened with a greeting: “Welcome to the Nizhny Novgorod online store of the Agu company!!!” The store, as the home page announced, was “open around the clock”, while a live operator answered the telephone 78-22-55 daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; the same operator could be asked about stock availability, discounts and special offers[1].

The terms of business were set out in the same place. Delivery within Nizhny Novgorod was free and was carried out within twenty-four hours of the order being received, and the operator called back to agree on a convenient time; the minimum order came to 500 rubles, and payment was accepted by the courier in cash “and only in rubles”[1]. In a separate line the site stipulated that all data provided was strictly confidential and intended solely for the store's operations[1].

The instructions for placing an order explained the mechanics of the cart to the buyer literally step by step: on the product page one had to state the quantity and press the “Order” button, and it had to be pressed at the bottom of every page with selected items; what was selected went into the “Cart”, whose button was located in the upper part of the site, and there one could see the total, remove anything unwanted and place the order[1]. The saved copy of the page is written in the KOI8-R encoding[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site entered the census of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet by way of the lists of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004: in the contest's final table Agu.nn.ru was entered in the “Most useful site” category and collected 3 votes by e-mail and 1 by SMS — the 39th row out of 48 in the category's list, sorted by number of votes[4]. In the directory of the Counter.nn.ru hit counter, from which the traffic of Nizhny Novgorod sites of that era is reconstructed, agu.nn.ru does not appear at all, so we have no measurements of its audience; on the methodology of the count, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

How it closed

More than five years lie between the snapshot of the working store and the next copy available to us. Already in the snapshot of 21 January 2010, instead of the store the address served a service page of the hosting provider: “NN.RU — The Best Hosting for companies in Nizhny Novgorod”, with a message that the requested address points to this server but that a resource with such a name was not found, and a telephone/fax (8312) 19-77-99, 19-97-84[2]. The same stub stands on the last snapshot as well — 5 September 2010[3]. The store's address was a third-level name in the nn.ru domain, and by 2010 it pointed to a server of the Nizhny Novgorod hosting service NN.RU[2].

A liveness check made while this census was being prepared found no agu.nn.ru domain: the address no longer exists. There is no trace in the available material of the store having moved to another address.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Domain page, January 2010 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Domain page, September 2010 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)