santeh.nn.ru was the website of a Nizhny Novgorod group of companies called "Santeh Center" (Center of Plumbing), which sold heating, plumbing, and pool equipment and installed building engineering systems. As the home page stated, the group was formed in 1996 and by the mid-2000s ran a network of stores and offices in Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow[2]. The Nizhny Novgorod outlets were located on Nizhnevolzhskaya Embankment, buildings 9 and 16, with phone numbers listed under the 8312 area code[1][2]. In the nn.ru directory the site was listed under the name "Novaya Santekhnika" (New Plumbing) with the description "Sale and installation of boilers, pools, air conditioners."

The home page: from a list of addresses to a corporate site

The earlier of the two snapshots we have, from 19 June 2003, shows a home page that amounted to the heading "Santeh Center Nizhny Novgorod" and a list of retail outlets: two addresses in Moscow (near the Sokolniki metro station, Kolodezny Lane, building 3, left wing of the "SM-1" building-materials store, and near the Ploshchad Ilyicha metro station, Novorogozhskaya Street, building 5) and two in Nizhny Novgorod[1]. The Nizhny Novgorod stores were divided by product line: at Nizhnevolzhskaya Embankment, 9, second floor, trading was done under the sign "Boilers, Pools, Air Conditioners" (phones 78-08-41, 30-37-01, 78-08-54), while Nizhnevolzhskaya Embankment, 16 carried "Pipes, Radiators, Irrigation Systems" (31-34-59, 34-21-51, 31-30-83)[1].

By December 2005 the home page looked different. The site was named "Santeh Center and the 'Fabrika Tepla' (Heat Factory) chain of branded stores," had a menu of sections — "About Us," "Documents," "Vacancies," "Services," "Gallery," "Price List," "Store," "Forum," and "Addresses" — as well as a search function for the online store[2]. As the home page put it, "any equipment we carry can be ordered online"[2]. The group named its main lines of work as the design, installation, and servicing of heating systems and boiler equipment, sewage and water supply, ventilation and air conditioning, and pool equipment; retail and wholesale sales were handled through the "Fabrika Tepla" stores[2].

The news column on the same snapshot gives a sense of the site's day-to-day life: on 22 November 2005 a boiler room at the "Stroyinvest" production site was added to the "Gallery" section, on 9 December a boiler room at the "Pospel" factory was added, and on 29 November the site announced that high-pressure acetylene gas hose had gone on sale[2]. By this time the Nizhny Novgorod network consisted of three outlets: Nizhnevolzhskaya Embankment, 9, second floor ("Boilers, Pools, Air Conditioners"), Nizhnevolzhskaya Embankment, 9 ("Novaya Santekhnika. Pools. Spa. Fireplaces") — both with the phone number 61-91-82 — and Nizhnevolzhskaya Embankment, 16 ("Pipes, Radiators, Boilers, Gas Water Heaters, Irrigation Systems")[2]. The Moscow side had grown to three addresses, including a pavilion at the "Sindika O" building-materials market at kilometer 65 of the Moscow Ring Road (MKAD)[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the nn.ru directory the site was listed under two sections at once, within the "Firms (Enterprises) — Equipment: manufacture, sale, installation, service" branch: "Ventilation and Heating" and "Plumbing." Next to the name "Novaya Santekhnika" the directory printed a counter reading: in the surviving 2002 snapshots of the directory it was "Rating: 117" in the first section and "Rating: 120" in the second; the summary in our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating records a value of 304 for santeh.nn.ru. That places it in the middle of the top third of the sample: of the directory's 2,819 addresses, a nonzero Counter.nn.ru reading survives for 1,046, and a value of 304 ranks 169th among them. A separate directory entry also existed for the neighboring address santeh.nnov.ru, under the name "Santeh Center."

The site does not appear in the surviving results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote[3]: as far as we can tell from the available materials, it did not take part in the competitive portion of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

How it closed

The Wayback Machine's first capture of the santeh.nn.ru home page is dated 6 July 2001, and the archive holds 39 records of it in total. The latest snapshot with substantive content available to us was taken on 27 December 2005[2]. As of our survey the santeh.nn.ru domain no longer exists; what became of the group of companies itself cannot be determined from the materials available to us.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)