sankom.r52.ru was the website of Sankom LLC, a Nizhny Novgorod firm that sold plumbing and sanitary-engineering products and supplied them to construction sites. As the home page stated, the company appeared "on the Nizhny Novgorod market of plumbing products, equipment and services in December 1999"[1], and its office was located in Nizhny Novgorod at Kuzbasskaya Street, house 1"B", 4th floor, office 43[2]. The site lived in the Nizhny Novgorod regional domain zone r52.ru; the home-page snapshots preserved in the web archive span the period from December 2000 to August 2006[1][3].

First version: a calling-card page

The snapshot from December 4, 2000 caught the site as a single page telling the company's story. Its main activity was named as "supplying construction sites with plumbing products" and turnkey services for both individuals and organizations[1]. The same page listed the geography of its orders outside the region: as the home page put it, "we are known in Moscow, Kaluga, Samara, Ulyanovsk, Penza, Vladimir, Lipetsk"[1]. A separate line carried a promise: "the day is not far off when the firm will open its own production of pipe fittings and polyethylene sewer pipe"[1]. At the bottom stood the copyright notice "© 2000 Sankom LLC" and the developer's signature — Teamoty Brane Inc.[1]

Catalog, price list and news

By May 2004 the site had turned into a small corporate catalog with a six-section menu: "About the Company," "News," "Services," "Price List," "Contacts," "Catalog"[2]. The header carried the postal code 603108, the address, and three Nizhny Novgorod-code phone numbers — tel/fax (8312) 77-84-55, 74-97-74, 74-96-74[2]. The sidebar served as a product directory: shutoff and control valves, tools and fixtures, fire-fighting and welding equipment, heating-system devices and equipment, sanitary ceramics, water-supply systems, sewer systems, pipe connectors, steel pipes, "Proflex-Termo" pipes, sealing and insulation materials, clamps[2]. The firm described itself as a "stable Nizhny Novgorod company" whose main advantage was "the ability to fully supply plumbing equipment for construction projects of any scale, from a single room or house to a residential microdistrict"[2].

The news block on the home page functioned as a product showcase. An entry from December 1, 2003 offered "Proflex-Termo" pipes as an "effective solution to the problem of heating and hot water supply," while an entry from February 16, 2004 announced a "novelty on the Nizhny Novgorod market" — polypropylene pipes and fittings of the "FD" brand, Russian-made (PN-10, PN-16, PN-20, diameters DN16–DN63), from raw material supplied by Germany's Hostalen and Finland's Borealis, with certificate ROSS RU.AYa12.N002721 dated September 3, 2003[2]. The page displayed the visitor's current date and time: at the moment of the snapshot — "Sunday, May 23, 2004, 8:22"[2].

Later look and the site's stop

In the snapshot from August 13, 2006, the site's structure remained the same, but the page title had been rewritten for search queries and listed products directly in the title: "Sankom — Ostendorf PVC sewer pipes, Comap metal-plastic pipes and fittings, steel elbows, transitions, tees"[3]. The directory grew more detailed: the sewerage section split into internal and external systems, and the pipes section acquired the names PROFLEX and CASAFLEX[3]. A news item fresh for the page, dated October 14, 2004, described PVC pipes and fittings from Ostendorf-Kanalgrundrohr: buried up to a depth of 6 meters, diameters from 100 to 300 mm, lengths from 500 to 5000 mm, a bell-and-spigot joint with a pre-fitted sealing ring, in the color "orange-brown RAL 8023"[3]. At the same time, the neighboring news item on the same page was still dated December 2003: over the two years between the snapshots, the home page's content had barely been updated[2][3].

The last home-page snapshot preserved in our web-archive sample is dated August 13, 2006[3]. By the time of the census, the domain sankom.r52.ru was no longer responding, and our materials contain no information about the site moving to another address.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

Sankom was a typical representative of that part of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet for which third-level domains in the r52.ru zone existed in the first place: not a media outlet or a forum, but the corporate storefront of a small wholesale firm, where what mattered was the address, phone number, and product list. The site does not appear in the preserved samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, meaning it never reached the top rows of the local traffic ranking; we have no data on its traffic. In the published results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, the domain sankom.r52.ru does not appear[4]. For more on how the sample of sites that includes Sankom is constructed, see the article "Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating."

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2000 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2006 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)