steklo-lux.r52.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod company OOO "Steklo-Lux", a manufacturer and wholesale supplier of luxury-grade and clear glass for domestic automobiles[1]. The site ran in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru and was hosted there as well: the footer of the home page stated directly "Hosting by r52.ru"[1]. The Nizhny Novgorod connection is also confirmed by the text: the company described itself as operating "in the Nizhny Novgorod market" and listed Nizhny Novgorod companies among its partners[1]. The earliest surviving snapshot of the home page is dated 3 November 2001[1], and the last snapshot of the site in the web archive is dated 13 November 2010.

How the site was built

It was a small corporate business-card site made up of four sections. The horizontal menu consisted of the items "About the company", "Our products", "News" and "Contacts", and did not change across all surviving snapshots[1][3]. The start page opened with the "About the company" section, and only that section has survived in the archived snapshots to this day — the internal pages with products and contact details have not survived.

The text opened with an advertising line that the company kept unchanged for years: as the home page put it, "The eyes are the mirror of the soul. Your car's glass is not only the mirror of the soul of your 'iron friend', but also the mirror of your style"[1]. At the bottom of the page was the copyright notice "© 2001 OOO 'Steklo-Lux'" and two service lines — "Coding by Info-online" and "Hosting by r52.ru"[1]. There are no visitor counters in the surviving text of the home page.

What the company offered

In the 2001 edition, "Steklo-Lux" described itself as a structural division of a manufacturing plant producing tinted and clear glass that had by then been operating for three years, and emphasized its use of imported equipment and its own technology, including for the production of silk-screened glass[1]. Among its partners it named Nizhny Novgorod companies engaged in upgrading cars to "Lux" class: "Tsentr GAZ", TSS, "Nizhegorodets"[1]. The company promised "the lowest prices in the city", worked with both large and small wholesale orders, and offered a discount of about 20% on large batch deliveries[1].

The snapshot from 19 April 2003 repeats the 2001 edition word for word — the text was not edited for a year and a half[2]. By September 2004 the page had been rewritten, and the scale of the company's self-description noticeably changed: "Steklo-Lux" now called itself not a division but a "manufacturing firm and wholesale supplier" of glass for all domestic automobiles, and dated the start of the plant's operation to 1997[3]. The new edition included the claim that it was "the first enterprise after the 'Borsky Glass Factory'" to manufacture a full range of glass for all domestic automobiles, along with a statement that in 2003 the product line had passed homologation at the State Committee of the Russian Federation for Standardization and Metrology[3]. The list of plans now included "introduction of new technologies", and the sales geography was expanded from Nizhny Novgorod to "many regions of the Russian Federation"[3]. The old edition was not deleted during the rewrite: in the 2004 snapshot the old 2001 text survived in a hidden part of the page next to the new one[3]. The lines about coding and hosting also disappeared, and the year vanished from the copyright notice[3].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site belongs to the mass layer of corporate business-card sites that made up the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s: a company description page on free or cheap hosting in the local zone, updated once every few years. It entered our sample through the nn.ru directory's category listing. "Steklo-Lux" held no notable place in the measurable part of the Nizhny Novgorod web: the site does not appear in our surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating), and it is absent from the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote in 2004[4].

How it closed

After 2004 no substantive changes are visible on the home page in the archived snapshots. The last snapshot of the site in the web archive is dated 13 November 2010; the web archive recorded 24 captures of the address in total. The domain steklo-lux.r52.ru no longer exists, and the fate of the company itself cannot be traced from the surviving materials of the site.

Sources

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