enco.r52.ru was the website of Enco (Enco LLC), a Nizhny Novgorod wholesale trader of flooring materials. As the home page stated, the company had worked in the finishing-materials market since 1995, traded linoleum, carpet, and parquet, and ran a Nizhny Novgorod retail chain of "Gnom" ("Gnome") building-supply stores and the "Parket Plus" ("Parquet Plus") parquet showroom[3]. The site lived in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru; the copyright notice on its pages was dated 2000[1], the earliest Wayback Machine snapshot is dated April 2, 2001[1], and the last is dated February 8, 2005[4].
What Enco sold
The company described its main line of business as the wholesale trade of flooring — linoleum, carpet, parquet, "as well as accessories for them" — emphasizing direct deliveries from manufacturers[2]. Enco presented itself as the official dealer for the Volga-Vyatka region of three manufacturers — Sinteros LLC (the town of Otradny, Samara Region), Sintelon (Yugoslavia), and Kahrs (Sweden) — as well as a dealer of the French company Gerflor[2].
The home page described its customer base as stores, wholesalers, and builders in Nizhny Novgorod and the surrounding region — Kstovo, Balakhna — as well as Ivanovo, Kirov, Cheboksary, and Saransk[2]. Goods shipped from the warehouse; a separate line mentioned a flexible discount system and special discounts for social-purpose facilities such as hospitals and schools[2].
What the site looked like
In the earliest surviving snapshot, from April 2001, only the name "Enco," the 2000 copyright notice, and a developer credit — "Coding by Teamoty Brane Inc." — remained on the page; the meta keywords listed "linoleum, kovrolin, parket, kovrovye pokrytiya" (linoleum, carpet, parquet, carpeting)[1].
By November 2002 the site was a small corporate "business card" page with a five-item menu: "About the Company," "Our Products," "Price List," "News," "How to Find Us"; the home page was "About the Company," and the browser window title read "Enco / About the Company"[2]. In the January 2004 snapshot the "Price List" item had disappeared from the menu, leaving four sections, and the title had changed to a product-focused one: "Enco / Linoleum, Parquet, Carpeting"[3].
By then addresses had also been added to the home page. The wholesale stores were listed at 127 Komintern Street and, in Kstovo, at 21 40 Let Oktyabrya Street[3]. The "Gnom" building-supply stores were located at 69 Beketov Street (phone 62-13-23) and 1 Poyushchego Street (phone 96-07-59), and the "Parket Plus" parquet showroom at 47b Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street (phone 78-00-82)[3]. Phone numbers were given in the six-digit local format, without a long-distance code. The home page stated that the "Gnom" stores "had earned the well-deserved love and recognition of Nizhny Novgorod residents"[3].
The developer credit "Coding by Teamoty Brane Inc." appeared in the page footer in 2001 and 2002[1][2]; it is no longer present on the home page in the 2004 and 2005 snapshots[3][4].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
enco.r52.ru is a typical example of the "second tier" of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s: a business-card site for a trading firm, built once and barely changed afterward. It entered our census through the nn.ru directory, where it was listed under flooring materials, not through the traffic-ranking; it does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter — for more on the methodology see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. In the final vote tally of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, which lists other sites in the r52.ru zone as well, the address enco.r52.ru is absent[5].
Judging by its content, the site was not seeking a public audience: there was no order form and no price catalog on the home page, and the promised "Price List" eventually vanished from the menu[2][3]. The page functioned as a reference for wholesalers and builders: who we are, whose dealer we are, where to go.
How it closed
Over four years the text of the home page changed almost not at all: the 2002, 2004, and 2005 snapshots repeat the same company description word for word[2][3][4]. The "News" section remained in the menu the whole time[4]. The only notable difference in the last snapshot is that the year disappeared from the copyright notice: instead of "© 2000 Enco LLC" the bottom of the page simply reads "© Enco LLC"[4].
The last home-page snapshot in the Wayback Machine is dated February 8, 2005[4]; no later states of the site have survived. The domain enco.r52.ru does not respond in our checks — the address no longer exists. The subsequent fate of the Enco company itself, its "Gnom" stores, and the "Parket Plus" showroom cannot be traced from the site's archived snapshots.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)