ucon.r52.ru was the website of "Ucon" ("Юкон"), a Nizhny Novgorod law firm, operating in the early 2000s in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru. The home page introduced the firm with the slogan "A full range of legal services in one firm" and listed two city phone numbers with the Nizhny Novgorod code: (8312) 34-23-28 and 30-57-94[1]. According to the home page, the company was founded in July 1998; the copyright notice in the footer read "© 2000 Ucon"[1]. All surviving snapshots of the site date to 2001[3].
What the site looked like
This was a small corporate brochure site. The menu consisted of four items: "about the company," "services," "price list," "how to find us"[1]. Having a price-list section set "Ucon" apart from many law firms of the time, which limited themselves to a general description of services. Below the menu was a line of phone numbers, then the slogan, and the home page's single text block — "About the Company"[1].
The site's developer is credited in the footer: "Web design by Teamoty Brane Inc."[1]. There are no visit counters, banners, or link exchanges in the text of the saved snapshots — the page was limited to its own content.
What the company did
"Ucon" described itself as a firm working in several areas at once: litigation and arbitration, legal consulting, and the drafting and preparation of founding documents for enterprises of various legal forms[1]. According to the home page, the company's goal was "to provide our clients with the full range of services necessary for success in business"[1]. The same page stated that in a short time after its founding the firm had become one of the leading firms in arbitration and legal consulting — this is the site's own claim, not an independent assessment[1]. The home page text contained neither the names of the lawyers nor the office address: judging by the menu item "how to find us," the address was placed on a separate page, which has not survived in the archive.
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
In our inventory of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, the site is listed in the nn.ru directory, where its category description used the same phrase that appeared on the home page — "A full range of legal services in one firm." This is a typical case from the early business segment: a firm set up a page as an electronic business card and did not try to build an audience around it.
It did not hold a notable place in the rankings. It does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, on which the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating is based, and no votes for it are recorded in our data. "Ucon" does not appear in the final vote tally of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day[4] — though by that time the site had already shown no signs of life for several years.
How it closed
The web archive preserved three snapshots of the home page — March 31, April 5, and July 23, 2001 — and the text is word-for-word identical in all three[1][2]. Over half a year, not a single line changed on the home page, including the 2000 copyright notice: the site was built once and never maintained afterward. In total, the archive recorded five visits to this address, the last dated September 29, 2001[3].
No announcement of a move, no redesign, and no later versions of the page have survived. In our inventory the domain ucon.r52.ru is marked as no longer existing; what became of the "Ucon" company itself after 2001 cannot be traced from the available archival materials.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Snapshots of ucon.r52.ru in the web archive (archive)
- web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)