alphatr.nnov.ru was the site of "Alpha Trading" (Альфа Трейдинг), a Nizhny Novgorod firm that sold licensed software and computer components and later took up making websites to order. In the nn.ru directory the firm is listed as "Nizhny Novgorod Information Center 'Alpha Trading'" (Нижегородский информационный центр "Альфа Трейдинг"), with its activities described by the line "Licensed software, WEB development, computers and components." The address was hosted in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone nnov.ru; in the preserved web-archive sample the home page is represented by two snapshots — 27 March 2002[1] and 3 August 2003[2] — and the text of both matches word for word: over a year and a half the home page was never rewritten.
What the home page looked like
The site was built as a single-page storefront for a small trading firm. At the top sat a logo with an explanation that "clicking on our company's logo will take you to the home page," and next to it an invitation to a "virtual store"[1]. The navigation fit into a few items: "accounting setup," "software product," "WEB design"[1].
The page had no contact information in the usual sense: neither a postal address nor a phone number appeared on it. The only means of contact the firm offered was characteristic of the era — "If you need to purchase something, contact us by pager," as the home page put it[1]. At the bottom stood the line "recommended viewing resolution: 1024*768" and the credit "WEB master: CenPro"[1]. The spelling and punctuation on the page were shaky in places (misspellings such as "acquired" and "moved" rendered incorrectly in the original), which was typical for homemade corporate sites of the early 2000s.
What the firm sold
The home page described the range of goods in general terms: "a wide assortment of both software products and various components for your computer, reference-legal systems, information security systems"[1]. A separate line item was accounting setup — that is, servicing accounting software at the client's premises, not just selling boxed products.
Alongside the software trade came a consulting angle: the page promised heads of enterprises and firms "a few tips on how to prevent economic espionage and the leakage of commercial information"[1]. The theme of protecting trade secrets was tied to selling information security systems and was the firm's way of reaching a corporate buyer.
A notable place was given to a joint promotion with the Nizhny Novgorod computer firm "EVM SPEKTR" (ЭВМ СПЕКТР): a customer buying any item at "EVM SPEKTR" was entitled to a 5% discount on any software product from "Alpha Trading," while a customer buying a software product at "Alpha Trading" got a 3% discount at "EVM SPEKTR"[1]. This is a rare surviving trace of mutual customer exchange between two small Nizhny Novgorod computer firms.
Site news and traffic
The news feed on the home page was about the site itself, and it gives an exact sense of the enterprise's scale. It reported that "a virtual store is planned to be launched on our site," that "our site has successfully moved to a new server," and that "a new line of business for our firm has opened — creating WEB sites"[1]. Another line promised: "the site of the ZelNET group will be posted soon. Interesting ideas, the best duke-players and quake-players!!! Games over the Internet!!!"[1] — meaning the first order for the web-development line was to be the site of a local gaming community.
The firm named its own audience itself, without embellishment: "in the short time our site has existed, we get up to 10 visitors a day"[1]. The promised virtual store remained just a plan: in the second snapshot, taken more than a year later, the same news item stands in the same place, unchanged[2].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
"Alpha Trading" belonged to the lower, most numerous tier of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet: a small corporate site that made it into the nn.ru directory listing and was barely noticed beyond it. It does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter — we have no data on its ranking. It is also absent from the surviving results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote[3]. Such sites were never part of the recognized top ten covered by the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating — but they made up the bulk of the local network.
How it closed
According to the records of this study, the address first came to the web archive's attention on 5 March 2001, and a total of thirteen visits to it have been recorded. The last of the home-page snapshots preserved here is dated 3 August 2003[2]; our material has no information about the later fate of the domain or of the firm itself. The page left no notice of closing and no trace of a move to another address — the site simply stopped being updated and then disappeared, like most small commercial sites of the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone in the early 2000s.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet voting results, 2004 (archive)