bttm.nnov.ru was the website of the closed joint-stock company "Bortorgtekhmash" (Борторгтехмаш), an enterprise that manufactured trade equipment for shops[1]. The address operated in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone nnov.ru, and the site itself was listed in the nn.ru directory's rubricator, which is how it entered our sample; the directory description was taken from the first sentence of the home page. The earliest surviving snapshot is dated 17 November 2001[1], and the latest is 8 March 2005[4].

What the site looked like

This was a business-card page: the heading "BORTORGTEKHMASH", below it a letter-spaced subheading "c l o s e d j o i n t - s t o c k c o m p a n y", then four paragraphs of text about the plant and a footer with the copyright[1]. There is no navigation menu, no news feed, and no feedback form in the surviving text; nor is the enterprise's address, phone numbers, or corporate details visible in it.

The footer carried the developer's line: "© Developed by NPP Vektor-NGTU LLC" — it is identical in the 2001, 2003, and 2004 snapshots[1][2][3]. In the 2005 snapshot the credit changed to "© Design: INNOV.RU"[4].

In substance the text did not change: the snapshots from 17 November 2001, 25 January 2003, and 29 January 2004 match word for word, down to the typos and the claim that the plant "has been manufacturing and selling trade equipment for 40 years"[1][2][3]. Over the site's four years of life, that figure was never once updated.

What the plant offered

Trade equipment "for shops of all types" was named as the main product; besides it, the plant, as the home page stated, also produced light mechanization equipment, catering supplies for public catering enterprises, and equipment for procurement enterprises[1]. Alongside trade equipment it also made school equipment and furniture for medical institutions, as well as custom items built to the customer's drawings and sketches[1].

A separate paragraph was devoted to the production base. The plant described its own woodworking, stamping, and machine-assembly production and listed the processes it had mastered: molding of plastic parts, electric welding of aluminum and stainless steel in an argon environment, welding of metal in a carbon dioxide environment, and coating of metal products with polymer powder paints by the tribostatic spraying method[1]. The surviving text contains no prices and no list of specific products — the home page remained a reference note about the enterprise, not a storefront.

Issuer disclosures

By 2005 a block of joint-stock company documents had appeared below the text about the plant. The 8 March 2005 snapshot lists a material fact notice titled "Information on the dates of closing of the issuer's register", reports for Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 of 2004, and information on the issuer's securities issuance dated 26 April 2004 — all files were offered for download in Zip format[4]. This is the only substantive addition to the home page text over all four years.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site belonged to that layer of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet made up of factory business cards: a single page, text unchanged for years, and a presence in the directory as a way of being found. Its directory card carries neither a rating nor votes, and no visitor counter is visible in the surviving home page text either — there is nothing by which to measure the audience. In the surviving voting table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, the domain bttm.nnov.ru does not appear[5]. For more on how this slice is structured and how the popularity of Nizhny Novgorod sites was measured from the Counter.nn.ru rating data, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

How it closed

The last snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated 8 March 2005[4]; there are no later saved copies of the site in our sample, the domain is listed as dead, and no record of a move to another address has been noted. The fate of the enterprise itself cannot be traced from the site's materials: the last thing it reported about itself was quarterly disclosures for 2004[4].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)