renomex.r52.ru was the site of the Nizhny Novgorod company OOO "Renomex," a rapid photo-services firm that, as its homepage stated, had been operating "since April 1994"[1]. The address was a third-level domain in the Nizhny Novgorod zone r52.ru, and the site's regional tie was direct: the page named photo studio addresses on Nizhegorodskaya and Oktyabrskaya streets and spoke of a network of drop-off points "in Nizhny Novgorod and the surrounding oblast"[1]. Our web-archive sample holds four snapshots of the homepage: 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2006[1][4].

What survives

Everything of the site that made it into our sample fits on a single screen of text. The window title read ".:. OOO Renomex / O kompanii .:." ("About the company"), the page's only section was titled "About the company," and at the bottom stood the signature "© 2000 OOO Renomex"[1]. The 2001 and 2003 snapshots also preserve a developer credit line — "Coding," "Teamoty Brane Inc"[1][2]; it is already gone in the 2004 and 2006 snapshots[3][4]. No price list, product catalog, order form, or phone number appears anywhere in the surviving text.

In the 2003-2006 snapshots several revisions of the same company blurb sit side by side, and a trailing fragment of an HTML closing comment — "-->" — remains at the end of the text: old revisions were not deleted from the page but merely hidden from display[2][3][4]. There is also a visible trace of manual retyping: in a later revision the Latin brand names are typed with a mix of Cyrillic characters — "Коdak," "КОNICA," "Коnica" — and Fuji has turned into "FUGI"[2][3].

What the company offered

Per the homepage's own account, in 1996 Renomex was admitted to the worldwide "Kodak Express Quality Control System" program, and that same year an art-photography studio, "equipped with modern professional technology," took in its first clients[1]. In 2000, the same page stated, an agreement was signed with the official distributor of KONICA Corp. to roll out a network of photo shops and drop-off points under the "Konica Photo Express" brand, and Konica studios opened at 13 Nizhegorodskaya St. and 22a Oktyabrskaya St.[1]. A separate line mentioned an agreement with OOO "Noritsu" to promote that firm's products and services "in the Nizhny Novgorod region"[1]. The page offered customers three technologies at once — Kodak, FUJI, and Konica — in "a sought-after combination of price and quality"[1].

The size of the network is hard to reconstruct from the snapshots. The 2001 snapshot speaks of "about 30 photo shops and drop-off points" and "two new photo studios (keepsake photos, ID photos, art photography)"[1]. Later revisions of the same paragraph give "more than 30"[3][4] as well as "more than 300"[2][3][4], and in the 2004 and 2006 snapshots both figures sit in the very same file, so which number a visitor actually saw cannot be determined from the snapshot. By then the mention of two studios had also been replaced by wording about "a network of digital instant-photo studios for ID photos"[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

By genre this is a corporate calling card of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s: a single section telling the company's story, with no news and no services. In the cross-section of our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating, renomex.r52.ru did not come from the rating itself but from the nn.ru directory listing, whose description echoed the opening of the homepage's first sentence — "Renomex offers rapid photo services using Kodak technology." Of the 1,400 addresses in that sample, 222 belong to the r52.ru zone in which this address lived.

The site does not appear in our surviving Counter.nn.ru samples, and no traffic figures or votes were recorded for it. Nor does renomex.r52.ru appear in the final results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote[5].

How it closed

The site did not so much close as simply stop. The texts of the August 2004 and August 2006 snapshots match word for word[3][4]: the same page, the same 2000 copyright line, the same account, which by then described the company's past. The last homepage snapshot known to us is dated August 13, 2006[4]. By the time of our census the domain renomex.r52.ru no longer existed; where the company moved or how it wound down cannot be judged from the materials 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 — Home page, 2006 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet voting results, 2004 (archive)