scan.nnov.ru was the website of Scanplast, a Nizhny Novgorod firm that supplied materials and equipment for manufacturing fiberglass products. The office was located in Nizhny Novgorod, at 23a Rodionova Street, office 304; the footer of the homepage listed the phone number (8312) 317864 and the email address scan@kis.ru[1]. According to the firm's own statement, the site opened on 21 May 2002[1]; the last snapshot of the homepage in the web archive is dated 23 February 2011[4].

What it was

The site was corporate and narrowly industry-specific: it was entirely devoted, as the homepage put it, to "materials and technologies for manufacturing fiberglass products," and its pages carried information about materials from the company REICHHOLD[1]. The address to visitors targeted two audiences at once — "manufacturers of products based on polyester and vinyl ester resins, as well as investors wishing to put relatively small sums into promising and highly profitable modern technologies"[1]. The firm's motto was set out on its own line: "Our goal is to achieve mutual benefit through our clients' success"[1].

Thus Scanplast offered not just raw materials but a technology package: a set of materials together with a description of the production process, aimed at a small enterprise looking to start producing fiberglass items.

What the homepage looked like

The layout of the homepage was typical of an early-2000s corporate site. The sidebar column contained a "Our consultations" block, a "News subscription" form with a "Your e-mail" field and an "Unsubscribe" button, a "Site search" line with a "Find" field, and a "site map" link[1]. The center held a welcome message and an "Attention" feed with dated news items.

In the August 2002 snapshot the feed carried two entries: from 5 June 2002 — "New resins for pultrusion," reporting that Reichhold had launched two new resins and a pultrusion brochure, and from 21 May 2002 — "The SCANPLAST company's website has appeared on the Internet"[1].

By February 2005 the consultations block was filled with a live question and answer: "Your question: technology for producing artificial marble" — "Our answer: In the 'Instructions' section you will find the necessary information" (spelling as in the source)[2]. From this we know the site had an "Instructions" section with descriptions of technologies. The news feed had been updated by then: 2 November 2004 — "New prices. As of 22.10.2004 the price list has changed," 6 December 2004 — "Our email address has changed"[2]. Meanwhile the footer signature remained untouched: the same address on Rodionova, the same phone number, the same scan@kis.ru mailbox, and the copyright notice "(c) 2002"[2]. A telling detail of the era: the firm had its own domain in the nnov.ru zone, yet kept its mail on someone else's — in the kis.ru zone[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

Scanplast belonged to that numerous part of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet that did not compete for traffic: the site served a narrow circle of manufacturers and did without any entertainment section. It does not appear in the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004[3]. In the available samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter no figures for it are recorded either, so there is nothing to judge its audience by; the overall picture of the surviving data is examined in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

How it closed

The web archive preserved about thirty captures of the scan.nnov.ru homepage[4]; in our sample of texts there are two — from 2002 and 2005[1][2]. Between them the homepage barely changed: the same welcome text, the same footer, with only the news and the consultations block being updated. The last snapshot dates to 23 February 2011[4]; by the time this survey was compiled, the domain no longer responded. No information about the fate of the firm itself is available in the materials we have.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Snapshots of scan.nnov.ru in the web archive (archive)