karavannn.r52.ru was the website of a Nizhny Novgorod wholesale trading company, OOO "Karavan NN" (Caravan NN), operating in the 2000s in the Nizhny Novgorod hosting zone r52.ru. According to the home page, the company was established on 29 March 2000 and dealt in wholesale trade of photo goods, watches, electrical goods and household sundries[1]. Its Nizhny Novgorod affiliation is confirmed both by the site's address and by the caption at the bottom of the page: by 2004 a line reading "Hosting by R52.RU" had appeared there[3]. Snapshots of the home page survive in the web archive from March 2001 to December 2008.

What the site was

It was a static one-page business card headed "Karavan NN:: About the Company". The entire text fit into a short list of product groups. Photo goods were named as the main product category — "cameras, batteries, photo albums, picture frames, film, photo-lab consumables, cases, tripods, etc."[1]. Next came stockings "domestic and Italian brands," watches and clocks (alarm clocks, wristwatches, wall clocks, mantel clocks, table clocks), electrical goods (razors, hair dryers, curling irons) and household goods — "locks, extension cords, power strips, soldering irons, glues, light bulbs, lighters." The list closed with the line "Playing cards and other goods"[1].

Such an assortment — photo supplies mixed with hosiery and small household appliances — was typical of wholesale firms of the time, which traded not in a single category but in whatever could be bought in bulk. No warehouse or office address, phone number, or names of managers appear on the surviving snapshots of the home page: the site stated what the company sold, but did not explain how to reach it. The only credit line was the developer's: "Web design by Teamoty Brane Inc."[1].

A site that never changed

The three snapshots in our sample — from 31 March 2001[1], 19 April 2003[2] and 12 December 2004[3] — contain verbatim the same text. Over three and a half years, not a single word about the products changed on the home page: no news, no price list, no contact details, no note of a change in the range appeared. The only difference between the last snapshot and the two earlier ones is the line about R52.RU hosting added at the end[3].

This is a characteristic story for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s: a company would commission a website as a mandatory attribute of an online presence, get a single page, and never return to it. The site, meanwhile, went on hanging on the web for years: the wholesaler had no reason to edit anything, and the hosting fee was paid automatically.

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

"Karavan NN" belonged to the lower, inconspicuous layer of the local web. It does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter — this site's traffic is not recorded in our data; it is known from a directory category of a Nizhny Novgorod portal, where it was listed with a four-word description: photo, household goods, electrical goods, watches (on the sampling method, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). The domain karavannn.r52.ru does not appear in the final voting table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day[4] — it was not among the nominees or winners of the Nizhny Novgorod sites showcase, which is unsurprising for an unchanging business-card page.

Even so, it is representative of the mass layer that the Nizhny Novgorod web mostly consisted of. Portals, forums and news feeds were in plain view, but alongside them, in the nn.ru, nnov.ru and r52.ru zones, lived the static business cards of small trading firms — sites without traffic, without updates, and with almost no trace beyond occasional web archive snapshots.

How it closed

The web archive's last snapshot of the home page was made on 24 December 2008[5]. What happened to the site after that cannot be traced documentarily: the surviving pages contain no messages about the company closing or the site moving to another address. As of today the domain karavannn.r52.ru is not working: in our check it does not respond. The further fate of OOO "Karavan NN" itself cannot be traced from the material available to us.

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 — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Last snapshot of the home page in the web archive, 2008 (archive)