stekk.r52.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod manufacturing and trading company OOO "STEKK", which operated in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru in the first half of the 2000s. As the home page stated, the firm was registered in 1994 and manufactured construction nails and furniture foam, and also traded in industrial cutting tools and rolled metal[1]. The earliest surviving snapshot of the home page is dated March 31, 2001[1], and the last snapshot in the web archive is from April 4, 2005[3]; today the domain no longer exists. The site belongs to the circle of resources described in our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating and the directories of the early Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

What the site looked like

The site was arranged in the simplest possible way: a horizontal menu of five items — "About the Company," "News," "Products," "Services," "How to Find Us" — and a single business-card page that fit the entire description of the enterprise[1]. The internal sections have not survived in the snapshots available to us, so neither the company's address nor its phone number can be reconstructed from the archival material: the "How to Find Us" page never made it into the web archive.

At the bottom of the home page were the copyright notice "© 2001 OOO 'STEKK'" and the line "Coding by Info-online" — apparently a credit to whoever did the markup[1]. No visitor counters, banner exchanges, or feedback forms are visible in the text of the snapshots: the site was a static business card with no interactive elements, typical of industrial enterprises of the time.

What the company offered

The list of activities on the home page was split into three parts. In-house production: construction nails and furniture foam. Sales: industrial saws — "frame, circular, band, hacksaws, etc." — industrial knives, spare parts for agricultural implements, and rolled sheet metal[1].

The third block covered service work — the most detailed part of the page. The firm repaired band saws (welding, sharpening, setting the teeth), carbide-tipped saws (re-brazing the tips, sharpening the teeth, straightening and hammering the blade), and circular saws (re-cutting the teeth, sharpening and setting the teeth, straightening)[1]. Such a list points to a clientele of woodworking and furniture manufacturers: the combination of "foam plus saw-tool servicing" served the same circle of customers.

Change of name: "STEKK" becomes "Stal-NN"

A snapshot from February 16, 2003 shows the very same page but under a different name: the heading, the introductory line, and even the copyright notice read as "OOO 'Stal-NN'," while the year in the copyright remained unchanged — 2001[2]. All the rest of the text — the year of registration, the range of products, the list of services, the site developer's credit — matches the 2001 snapshot word for word[1][2].

In other words, between 2001 and 2003 only the company's name was changed on the site, with neither the content nor the design touched. Whether this was a renaming of the same legal entity or a change of owner while keeping the same site and address cannot be established from the available material. One thing is telling: the domain address stayed the same — stekk.r52.ru — and the enterprise's new name no longer matched it.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site's membership in the Nizhny Novgorod segment of the network is defined by the domain zone itself, r52.ru — the regional zone of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast; it entered our sample from the nn.ru directory's category listing, where it was described as "manufacture of construction nails and furniture foam, sale of industrial saws."

The site played no notable public role. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, no traffic data for it was recorded. In the results table for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004 vote, stekk.r52.ru does not appear[4] — which is natural for an industrial firm's corporate business card: such sites did not compete for an audience and existed as a line in a directory to which a customer could be referred.

How it closed

The site showed no signs of development: over the four years between the known snapshots, the content of the page did not change, apart from the replacement of the company's name[1][2]. The "News" section had been present in the menu from the very start, but no news ever made it onto the home page.

The last snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated April 4, 2005[3]. Later the address stopped being served: at the time of our survey the domain stekk.r52.ru is not registered and does not redirect anywhere. What became of the enterprise itself — "STEKK" or "Stal-NN" — the site's archival materials do not say.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Last snapshot of the home page in the web archive, 2005 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)