skort.nnov.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod company "S.Kort," which supplied computer equipment and provided IT support services for businesses. It is known from web archive snapshots from 1999 to 2014; in 1999 the company listed a Nizhny Novgorod address on the site — Ulyanova Street[1].

The first version: frames and a phone number on Ulyanova Street

The earliest surviving snapshot of the home page is dated 10 October 1999[1]. The site was built using frames, and a visitor whose browser did not support them was met with a disclaimer typical of the late 1990s: they were invited to "look for" a current browser version on the Netscape or Microsoft websites[1]. All the rest of the page's content available to the text archiver fit into four lines: the heading "S.KORT, Nizhny Novgorod," the address "Nizhny Novgorod, Ulyanova St., 46," the phone number (8312) 38-45-43, and the email address skort@sandy.ru[1]. The company's mailbox was registered under someone else's domain — sandy.ru — while the site itself was hosted in the regional nnov.ru zone.

What the company offered

By the last snapshot, taken on 1 April 2014, the site already looked like a corporate portal with a menu of "About Us," "News," "Contact Us," "Partners," "Clients," and a "Log In" button[2]. The snapshot's text also captured the engine's service labels — "Skip Ribbon Commands," "Turn on accessibility features," "Turn off animations" — along with a request to enable JavaScript and try again[2].

The home page described a "full range of information-technology support services for business": supply and support of computer equipment of both Russian assembly and foreign brands, components and peripherals; supply of licensed software; supply and installation of network equipment and network design; comprehensive information security solutions; office equipment and air-conditioning systems; telephony; deployment of digital video-surveillance systems; and equipment repair and maintenance[2]. The home page promised the client "fast and skilled resolution of the tasks set," "an individual approach and reasonable prices," and "guaranteed operability of every part of the information-technology complex"[2].

The same page also gave a brief history of the firm in its own telling: the company "S.KORT" was founded in early 1994, and "over 19 years" it had accumulated a list of partner statuses[2]. The list, dated year by year, itself serves as a chronology of the Nizhny Novgorod company's growing ties with vendors: Microsoft.nn.ru, Intel Product Integrator (IPI) since 1997, Microsoft OEM System Builder since 2000, Microsoft Certified Technical Education Center (2000), Symantec Premier Software Partner since 2001, 1C partner and authorized D-Link reseller since 2007, "Doctor Web" partner, Seagate Partner and ABBYY Authorized Reseller since 2008, Kaspersky Lab partner and AXIS Authorized Partner since 2009[2]. The page footer carried the copyright notice "© S.Kort LLC, 2013"[2]; that same year is also implied by the "over 19 years" count from 1994 — meaning the home page text that reached the 2014 snapshot had in fact been written a year earlier.

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod The Internet

The site entered the overall top ranking of the regional counter Counter.nn.ru in 2000; the figure recorded in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating was 0.16, meaning S.Kort sat at the very bottom of the list: this was a calling-card site for a corporate-clients supplier, not a mass-audience resource. In a directory listing from the same period, the site was described as the "Website of the C.KORT company (Nizhny Novgorod)" with a list of categories: computers, components, peripherals, consumables, cable systems, software, digital video-surveillance systems, technical support and maintenance, air-conditioning systems. The site is not listed among the participants of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote.

For the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, S.Kort is an example of a long-lived service-genre site: the address survived for about fifteen years and outlasted a change of web-design generations — from the frames of 1999 to the portal engine of 2014. In both surviving snapshots it is occupied with the same task: representing an offline firm rather than leading an independent online life.

How it closed

The last home-page snapshot in the web archive is dated 1 April 2014[2]; the archive index contains 27 records for this address in total for 1999-2014. A check of the domain performed while preparing this survey returned no content: the site at skort.nnov.ru no longer works, and there is no information about it having moved to another address.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 1999 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)