pryanik.nnov.ru was the website of "Malysh," a Nizhny Novgorod company producing handmade gingerbread (pryaniki). The site and production were listed as owned by sole proprietor Izolda Ivanovna Chuykova, with contact details in the page header giving Nizhny Novgorod and the phone number (8312) 68-04-64[1]. According to the home page, the company was founded in 1999[1]. By July 2003 the site was already listed in the directory of Nizhny Novgorod websites on nn.ru[3]; the surviving snapshots of the home page are dated 2006 and 2008[1][2]. It is a typical example of the early Nizhny Novgorod Internet: a business-card site for a small local producer, built once and never changed afterward.

How the site was built

The home page opened with a menu bar of six sections: "About the Company," "Information for Customers," "Production Process," "Photo Gallery of Our Products," "Prices," "Leave a Message"[1]. Below the menu was a contact line giving the city, the entrepreneur's name, and the phone number, followed by a single long "About the Company" text that occupied the entire first page[1].

It was written not in a business tone but in an almost advertising-lyrical one. "In our age of mechanization, there is an ever-growing shortage of products into which not just labor but soul and the warmth of human hands have been invested," read the pull quote at the top of the page, as the home page put it[1]. Further down it was stressed that the firm was "one of the few in the Russian market to make gingerbread not by conveyor but by hand"[1]. The catalog description of the site in the nn.ru directory was noticeably drier: "Description of the Company, description of the production process for handmade gingerbread with a shelf life of 60 days"[3].

What the site said about production

The main value of the archived snapshot is its detailed description of the product range. At the time the text was written, the "Malysh" brand had 21 varieties of gingerbread: 16 filled varieties, 3 stamped ("printed") varieties, plus the "Vatrushka" and "Yozhiki" (Hedgehogs) gingerbreads[1]. The fillings were listed by name — apricot, orange, lemon, peach, strawberry, kiwi, raspberry, lingonberry; a layer of filled dough was rolled out into a sheet and cut with dividers, so the filling was visible from all sides[1]. The "Vatrushka" gingerbreads, filled with boiled condensed milk, were sprinkled with coconut flakes over the not-yet-cooled glaze; the stamped ones were two-layered, the layers joined with boiled condensed milk and stamped with a mold, including a "City of Sweets" design; the stamped variety went on sale in 2003[1].

The "Osyotr" (Sturgeon) gingerbread was described separately — shaped as a sturgeon curled into a ring, nose to tail, weighing 200 g, packaged in a box with a transparent window; the page placed it in the premium class and specified that it was baked only by the most experienced of the roughly thirty confectioners working at the enterprise[1]. The site claimed a shelf life of up to two months without preservatives, availability by weight and prepackaged, and patents covering the entire product line[1]. Its distribution reached beyond the region: in Moscow the gingerbread was said to be available at the firms "Valentin" and "Gorod Sladostey" ("City of Sweets"), with mentions of the Moscow Oblast and plans to cooperate with chain stores in the capital[1]. The site placed itself in the "medium" or "medium+" price category[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site was listed in the nn.ru directory under the branch "Firms (Enterprises) — Industry — Food Industry" and was connected to the Counter.nn.ru counter under number 10535[3]. In snapshots of the category from July 2003 its rating ranged from 8 to 12 — for comparison, in the same category the "Nizhny Novgorod Oblast Consumer Union" showed 13, and the Dzerzhinsk Meat Processing Plant site showed 31[3]. This placed it in the lower part of the table: traffic to the small confectionery producer's site was measured in single-digit visits per day. On how such ratings worked and what can be learned from them, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

In the surviving results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, neither the domain pryanik.nnov.ru nor the company name appears[4] — the site did not take part in the competitive segment of the Nizhny Novgorod web.

How it ended

The texts of the snapshots from August 28, 2006 and April 11, 2008 match word for word, down to the phrase "it has already been the second year that 'Vatrushka' gingerbread has been on the market"[1][2]. In other words, the content of the home page did not change over a year and a half: the site was written once and simply stayed up after that. The last snapshot of the home page available to us is dated April 11, 2008[2]. By the time this entry was compiled the domain no longer responded; the surviving materials say nothing about the fate of either the address or the production itself.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2006 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2008 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, «Food Industry» category, 2003 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)