levshann.ru was the site of a Nizhny Novgorod furniture company, "Levsha-NN," a maker of upholstered furniture: sofas and armchairs. The earliest surviving snapshot of the home page is dated 7 July 2004; in the page's meta description the company listed itself as follows: "Levsha-NN Furniture Company, Levsha-NN, Nizhny Novgorod, furniture from the manufacturer, Nizhny Novgorod furniture, upholstered furniture, sofas, armchairs"[1]. In that same year, 2004, the site was entered as a contestant in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day[4]. The last home-page snapshot in the web archive is dated 14 May 2019, and the furniture company is no longer there[5].

The company and its products

As the home page reported in 2004, the company had by then already been operating for ten years: "...for 10 years now the company 'Levsha-NN' — a domestic manufacturer of 'soft' products — has been bringing this to life"[1]. The section was titled "About the Company," and the text itself was written in the style of a consumer essay about upholstered furniture rather than a description of the business: musings on how "furniture is the kind of purchase that most of our compatriots make once or twice in a lifetime," along with advice on how a buyer could avoid making a mistake when choosing[1].

The product range can be seen from the poll "Which products do you like?" embedded on the home page. It listed seven items: the "Kareliya" sofa bed, the "Svetloyar" lounge chair, an office sofa, the "Kupava" corner sofa (also available with a double shelf as "Kupava-2"), and the "Kareliya-3" sofa bed. At the time of the snapshot, 19 people had voted; the largest shares — 26% each — went to "Kareliya" and "Kareliya-3," with another 21% going to the "Kupava" corner sofa with the double shelf[1].

What the site looked like

In the 2013 and 2016 snapshots, the home page opened with the headline "Golden Fleece — upholstered furniture for everyone" and the tagline "Levshann.ru — furniture manufacturing." The menu consisted of five items: "Home," "Products," "Order," "Contacts," and "Other furniture sites"[2].

The main text was devoted to upholstery fabric. As the home page stated, the choice of fabrics included "flock, tapestry, velour, chenille, ras-velour, and the true fashion cry — Golden Fleece," the latter explained through the myth of the Argonauts, but in fact being "a new fabric from the Torissimo factory (Canada), creating the complete illusion of the legendary animal's hide"[2]. A separate paragraph covered the frame: "Our company uses coniferous wood species for its production. Pine is the tree of calm and loftiness of spirit." The page closed with a practical promise: every model came with mandatory instructions for use and cleaning[2].

At the bottom of the page was the tagline "2008-2009." The texts of the 2013 and 2016 snapshots match word for word — for at least the last seven years of the site's existence, its home page did not change[2][3].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

"Levsha-NN" took part in the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day in the "Best Corporate Website" category under entry number 231. In the final voting table, the site shows zeros in both columns — not a single vote by email and not a single vote by SMS; the category listed 97 entrants in total, and the leader was the "Aprel Servis" store with 159 emails and 28 SMS votes[4].

In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, which underlie the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating, the site does not appear: we have no data on its traffic. For the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the mid-2000s this is a typical case — a corporate business card for a manufacturing company, set up for the sake of an online presence and more visible in directories than in traffic.

How it closed

The furniture site disappeared sometime between 2016 and 2019, but the domain did not become vacant. In the snapshot from 14 May 2019, the address levshann.ru hosted a page titled "Online Store 'Odezhda'" ["Clothing"], and its text described an entirely different business: a network of service centers repairing children's strollers, bicycles, roller skates, ice skates, and wheelchairs, founded in 2015, with branches in Orenburg, Kazan, and Zelenodolsk. The Nizhny Novgorod connection remained: the page listed "Nizhny Novgorod," the address site@levshann.ru, and the tagline "'Levsha Nizhny Novgorod' on social media"[5]. There are no home-page snapshots later than this date in the web archive.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2016 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, 2004 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2019 (archive)