autofurgon.r52.ru was the website of a Nizhny Novgorod firm, OOO "Avtofurgon" (Autofurgon), which sold cargo vans and special-purpose vehicles on GAZ and ZIL chassis. The company received customers in Nizhny Novgorod, at Larina[2], and represented in the city a Ryazan van-manufacturing plant, OOO "Furgon-Servis" (Van-Service)[2]. The site lived in the r52.ru zone from roughly 2000 — the earliest snapshot, from March 2, 2001, already carries a "2000" copyright notice[1]; the last surviving snapshot of the home page is dated May 12, 2011[2].

First version: 2001

The early snapshot preserved an almost empty page: the window title "avtofurgon," the line "2000 Avtofurgon," and a designer's credit — "Web design by Teamoty Brane Inc."[1]. The substantive content back then apparently rested on graphics that the web archive did not preserve, though the markup's service fields survived. The page's meta description for search engines read: "Sale of cargo vans and special vehicles on GAZ, ZIL chassis, from the Ryazan van-manufacturing plant OOO"[1]. The keywords listed body and vehicle types — "Bychok," Gazelle, insulated, van, bread van, dry-goods van, custom, mobile shop, all-metal, tow truck, refrigerated body, chassis, flatbed — as well as a geographic tag: "Gorky," "Nizhny Novgorod"[1].

Van catalogue, address, and phone numbers

By 2011 the home page had turned into one long price-list text addressed to "dear sirs." It opened with the manufacturer: "The manufacturing enterprise OOO 'Furgon-Servis' has been making cargo vans since 1993"[2]. Vans were offered GAZelle, GAZ-3307, 08, 09, ZIL, the ZIL "Bychok," MAZ, KAMAZ, VIS, KIA, HYUNDAI, and "IVEKO" (the site's own spelling)[2].

The page put the range at 500 names and variants and broke it down by purpose: furniture vans, insulated vans, bread vans, refrigerated units, sandwich-panel vans, mobile shops (including grill vans), semi-trailers and trailers, trading trailers, mobile workshops and shift-camp vans, custom builds[2]. Besides the bodies themselves, the site sold the vehicles too — the "Gazelle," "Farmer," GAZ-3307, 08, 09, the ZIL "Bychok," a long-wheelbase ZIL — as well as tow trucks on a ZIL "Bychok" base, special equipment, and spare parts for ZMZ, GAZ, and ZIL[2].

The site described the technical details in as much detail as the range. The vans were built frameless, which, the page claimed, cut weight compared to wood-and-metal analogues by 25%[2]. Chassis and load capacity were given: the GAZ-3302 "Gazelle" with the 402, UMZ, and 406 engines — 1.5 t, the GAZ-3307 — 4 t, the diesel ZIL-5301 "Bychok" — 3.5 t[2]. The firm took particular pride in its insulated vans with polyurethane-foam insulation: "we were among the first to launch production," the home page stated[2]. The polymer coating was called there "a unique technology" that "extends the service life of the manufactured vans by 20-25 years"[2]. Custom vans and refrigeration-equipped vehicles were promised within ten working days, and, the site claimed, more than 40 units were always kept in stock[2].

The page closed with an invitation and contact details: "We await you at: Nizhny Novgorod, 26 Larina St. Tel. (fax) 8312 618-626, 618-625, 618-624, 618-713, 618-714"[2]. The site listed five phone lines under area code 8312 one after another, without splitting them by department. A separate slogan read "We work without intermediaries!": a direct "buyer-to-manufacturer link," in the text's own words, saved money "so necessary for growing your enterprise's profit"[2].

The page was plainly homemade: the text kept typos such as "predagaem" [we ofer], "Avtomastarskie" [Auto repar shops], "Sendvich-Paneli" [Sandwitch panels], and "IVEKO," and the fragment preserved by the web archive breaks off in an unclosed markup comment[2]. The window title in the last version also carries a misspelling — "Autofurgon" instead of "Avtofurgon"[2] — though the content leaves no doubt it is the same Nizhny Novgorod firm on Larina Street.

Place in the The Internet

"Avtofurgon" was not a prominent site. It entered our census not from a ranking but from the directory of the nn.ru catalogue, where it was listed with a short line about manufacturing cargo vans on a "Gazelle" base. In the surviving snapshot of the Counter.nn.ru ranking, the address has no recorded traffic, and it is absent among the sites that won votes in the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day contest[3]. This is the ordinary fate of a corporate business-card site of that era: it was not built for an audience or for a place in the ranking tables, but so that a buyer could find a phone number and an address — and in that capacity it lasted ten years in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

How it closed

The web archive's snapshots break off on May 12, 2011[2], ten years and two months after the first, from March 2, 2001[1]. The web archive preserved no later snapshots of the home page. A check made while compiling this census showed that the domain autofurgon.r52.ru no longer exists: it does not respond and is unclaimed by anyone, and no successor to the site has been found. Of Nizhny Novgorod's "Avtofurgon," only these archived pages remain online.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archived)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2011 (archived)
  3. web.archive.org — Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet voting results, 2004 (archived)