"Filipok" (filipok.ru) was the website of a Nizhny Novgorod shop selling educational games and toys for children. The shop announced the opening of the site on 2 April 2004. Its Nizhny Novgorod connection is visible in the snapshot itself: orders were taken by telephone with the city code (8312), and customers' questions about bringing up children in the guest book were answered by Alina Viktorovna Korpich, director of the "Vedi" Nizhny Novgorod Child Development Centre. In that same year, 2004, the shop took part in the competition of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day[5]. The last snapshot of the working shop available to us is dated 14 November 2013; on 1 December 2021 an unrelated project was already opening at filipok.ru.
The shop of 2004
The earliest snapshot of the home page was taken on 4 April 2004, two days after the announced opening. The page was titled "Filipok Children's Goods Shop" and was arranged with utmost simplicity: a top menu of four items — "About the shop", "Contacts", "Guest book", "Help" — a search box, a basket reading "BASKET: EMPTY" and the notice "Orders by telephone: (8312) 14-32-64, 8-903-602-3264".
The catalogue was divided into thirteen lines: audio products, magic hook-and-loop toys, children's cosmetics, dexterity games, books, craft kits, board games, Zaitsev teaching aids, Nikitin teaching aids, related goods, goods for hire, lacing toys; the list was closed by "New arrivals". The display carried three items at 68 roubles each: "Magic Geometry", "Magic Astronomy" and "Ryaba the Hen (live reading)". As the home page put it, the shop was "intended for those who care about the intellectual development of children, their moral and mental health", traded "not only retail but also wholesale" and kept a separate system of prices for wholesale buyers; regular customers were promised discounts and gifts.
The site of 2013
By 2013 the site was arranged in an entirely different way. The heading of the home page listed its specialisation: "Educational games and toys: puppet theatre, finger theatre, teaching aids for speech therapy and special-needs education, Nikitin blocks". The menu had grown to ten items — "Home", "Catalogue", "Your questions", "New arrivals", "Sale", "Glossary of terms", "Photo gallery", "Articles", "Comparison", "Useful literature" — and to them were added the sections "Payment and delivery", "Contacts", "Wholesale price list", "Feedback", "For partners", "Link directory", "For customers", a basket that totalled the sum and a personal account with registration and password recovery.
The home page advertised the musical programme "12 Months", the printed board game "Flower Fairy" made up of sixteen identical squares, the "Hexagon" inset frame puzzle and the collection "200 School Crosswords", and, in a block of its own, the product group "KIDDY Car Seats" with the German quality mark "Sicher ist sicher". The "Catalogue: new arrivals" block held "Kalyaka-Malyaka" (Scribble-Scrabble) art materials (wax crayons in 12 colours, finger paints in 6 colours, 17.5 ml gouache in 8 colours, a palette), a doll on a sledge and the "Swans" embroidery kit, 26 × 35 cm; the prices have not survived in the snapshot — all that is left of them are the labels "rub.". Discounts were in force: 5% on printed board games and 7% on pictograms.
Besides the sales counter, the home page also had an editorial layer. The "Useful literature" section offered Rudolf Steiner ("The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science"), Werner Christian Simonis ("The Child up to the Age of Seven"), Maxim Kantor's two-volume "Textbook of Drawing" and Tatyana Zinkevich-Evstigneeva's "The Path to Magic". The "Articles" section was divided into two rubrics: "Playing with children" ("Activity mats", "Easter fun with children", "Playing with a future genius") and "Toys" ("Gifts are little islands of happiness", "Choosing toys for a child"); separately, the home page carried an announcement of a new article, "And in Rus it is Christmastide". The place of an "About the company" section on the home page was taken by an account not of the firm but of Chevostik — a character of the educational audio encyclopaedias "Journey to the Land of Knowledge" — and of their creator Elena Kachur.
Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day and the counters
At the competition of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day in 2004 the "'Filipok' Educational Games Shop" ran under number 177 in the "Most useful site" category. The final voting table records 47 votes for it by e-mail and none by SMS — the ninth line of the category out of forty-eight entrants; exactly the same number of votes was gathered by the entry that followed it, "ALIDI, a Nizhny Novgorod online shop", while the leader of the category, the "Nizhny Novgorod Auto Forum", had 212 e-mails and 36 SMS[5].
"Filipok" does not appear at all in the surviving rating tables of Counter.nn.ru (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating), so the shop's traffic cannot be judged from our material: in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet it remained a project noticeable through the competition, but not through the counter.
How it closed
The two snapshots of 2013 — of 15 February and of 14 November — coincide almost line for line: the same announcements, the same discounts, the same announcement of the "new article" about Christmastide. The only difference visible in our material is that "Link directory" disappeared from the list of sections. Over nine months the home page had barely changed.
The exact date of closure cannot be established from our material: the web archive lists 80 records for the domain, but we have no snapshots between November 2013 and December 2021. It is known that on 1 December 2021 the address filipok.ru opened the page "Listen to audiobooks online" with the description "Listen to audiobooks online for free. The collection of audiobooks is replenished regularly" — a site with recordings of Agatha Christie and Robert Silverberg, in no way connected with the children's shop and without any Nizhny Novgorod features. In our inventory the domain is marked as dead, and its history is divided into two parts: the "Filipok" shop, known from the snapshots of 2004–2013, and the unrelated project that took over the vacated address.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)