plastimeks.r52.ru was the website of Plastimeks, a trading company that supplied industrial enterprises with chemical raw materials, building materials, and packaging[1]. The domain was hosted in the Nizhny Novgorod zone r52.ru, and the home page invited orders and inquiries by phone and fax at a Nizhny Novgorod number — (831-3) 36-08-70 and 36-56-34[2]. The surviving web-archive snapshots span December 2002 to July 2007; over that period the company changed its legal form: in 2002 the site called it CJSC (ZAO) Plastimeks[1], and by 2007 it was LLC (OOO) Plastimeks[2].

What the firm sold

In the 2002 version, the site described Plastimeks as a supplier that had for several years been providing enterprises with chemical raw materials and building materials[1]. It separately noted a line of business new at the time — packaging for the transport and storage of paint-and-varnish products, petroleum products, chemicals, and other substances not actively corrosive to steel, as well as edible vegetable oils and 96-percent ethyl alcohol[1]. According to the home page, the packaging held a certificate of conformity from Gosstandart of Russia and a certificate from the Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation confirming the packaging met the international and national requirements for transporting dangerous goods[1].

By 2007 the list of offerings had become more specific. The firm presented itself as a supplier of raw materials, materials, packaging, and equipment, and reported working on the domestic market and in the countries of the near abroad[2]. Shipping was offered by pickup, by the supplier's own transport, by rail container, and through freight-forwarding companies[2]. Specific product lines were also named: carbamide-furan resins of grades KF-90, KF-65S, FF-65S, KF-40M, BS-40, furfuryl alcohol, hardeners KCh-41 and KTs-32, toluenesulfonic acid, and benzenesulfonic acid — which, according to the page text, were sold by the company's dealer in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Yuzhuraltranskhim LLC (Chelyabinsk, 84 Lenina Street, office 401)[2]. The presence of a dealer beyond the Urals is the only clue to sales geography preserved in the snapshots.

What the home page looked like

Both surviving snapshots are built the same way: a heading with the firm's name, a single "About the Firm" section, and an address to prospective partners — "Dear Sirs!" in 2002[1] and "Highly Esteemed Sirs!" in 2007[2]. The tone of the second version is noticeably more personal: on behalf of the staff, visitors were invited to cooperation that, as the home page put it, embodied "reliability, trustworthiness, and quality of relations"[2]. There is no price list, no order form, and no visit counters in the preserved snapshot text: the entire site fit into one address and a contact phone number — the typical setup of a small wholesale firm's corporate presence at the time.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

Plastimeks belongs to that part of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet that existed outside the competition for visitor traffic. We know the site from the nn.ru directory catalog, where it was listed with the description "chemical raw materials, building materials, packaging for paint-and-varnish products, petroleum products, chemicals, edible vegetable oils, 96% ethyl alcohol"; the same entry made its way into the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. The address does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, and our data records no traffic figures. The site does not appear among the results of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote[3]: the contest drew city portals, media outlets, and entertainment projects, and a page belonging to a wholesale supplier of chemical raw materials had no audience for that kind of vote.

How it closed

The web-archive index contains eighteen captures of the address, and the last surviving snapshot of the home page is dated 17 July 2007[2]. After that, the site's content was not updated in the archive; according to our data, the domain plastimeks.r52.ru no longer exists. Whether the firm itself continued operating, the snapshots do not say: the page vanished before it had a chance to tell its own story.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)