akkord-ck.r52.ru was the website of a Nizhny Novgorod trading firm, OOO Akkord-SK, which sold ventilation, climate-control, and heating equipment. The site lived in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru and was hosted there as well: the footer of the home page carried the line "Hosting: r52.ru"[1]. As the home page reported, the firm was founded on June 4, 1998 under the name OOO Akkord Praktik, and "as of November 1, 2001 the firm was renamed 'Akkord-SK'"[1]. The copyright notice on the page read "© 2001 OOO 'Akkord-SK'"[1], and the site itself is represented in the web archive by snapshots from 2002[2].

What the site looked like

It was a corporate business card of five sections: "About the Company," "News," "Our Products," "Services," "Our Contacts"[1]. The site opened on the "About the Company" section — the only one whose text survives in the available snapshots; the window title repeated the menu structure: "Akkord-SK / About the Company"[1].

The page carried a service meta description and a list of keywords for search engines — a device typical of corporate sites of the early 2000s. The keywords listed both product categories and brands: "fans, grilles, air ducts, ventilation, range hoods, air conditioners, heating equipment, oil radiators, corrugated pipes, air purifiers, Cata, S&P, VENTS, Venta, Kanalflart, Pyrox, DEC"[1]. No one proofread the text: the product list still contains the typos "aliuminium" [алюминивые] and "Italty" [Италтия][1]. At the bottom of the page the contractor is credited: "Coding: Info-online"[1].

What the firm offered

Akkord-SK described itself as the official dealer of OOO NPTs Ekoven and the regional dealer of the company Domotekhnika for the brands CATA, FALMEK and AIKONE[1]. The range listed on the home page covered nearly the whole of household climate control: built-in and dome-type kitchen range hoods (Spain, Italy); household fans for kitchens, bathrooms, and toilets (England, Spain, Russia); ventilation grilles made of German plastic; flexible aluminum and plastic air ducts, adapters, couplings, tees; household air conditioners — window and split systems (Japan, France); heat guns and air curtains (Sweden, Russia); oil radiators, fan heaters, and infrared heaters (Spain); instantaneous and storage water heaters (Italy); hand dryers (Germany, Russia)[1].

The message to the visitor fit in a single sentence: as the home page put it, "our specialists will provide you with complete technical information on any question that interests you and will prepare a technical proposal"[1]. Neither an address nor a phone number appears on the surviving page: contact details, judging by the menu, lived in the "Our Contacts" section[1], no snapshot of which survives in our material.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In our census the site is listed under the nn.ru catalog's directory — that is, it was known to the local audience as one of the addresses of urban equipment trade. At the same time it does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating, and the domain akkord-ck.r52.ru is not named in the published final results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day for 2004[3]. This is unsurprising: by December 2004 the site had already shown no signs of life for two years. It remained a typical representative of the lower, invisible part of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet — hundreds of corporate business-card sites that took part in no contests and no counters, yet made up its bulk. More on the method of this census itself — in the piece "Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating."

How it closed

The two surviving snapshots — January 20 and November 22, 2002 — match word for word: over ten months the home page did not change by a single line, and the promised "News" never materialized on it[1][2]. The last home-page snapshot included in our material is dated November 22, 2002[2]; there are no later web-archive captures of this address in our sample.

Today the domain akkord-ck.r52.ru does not respond[4]. What became of the firm itself — whether it moved to another address, changed its name, or closed — the archived snapshots do not say, and we have no reliable information on this. All that remains of the site is a single page, captured twice in 2002: the founding year, the renaming date, a list of range hoods and air conditioners, and a line about hosting in the Nizhny Novgorod zone.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (November snapshot) (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)
  4. akkord-ck.r52.ru — Address of the site akkord-ck.r52.ru, accessibility check