uventa.nn.ru was the website of Yuventa LLC, a Nizhny Novgorod company selling and servicing Minolta copiers and printers. The contacts in the footer of the home page gave a Nizhny Novgorod address and a city phone number: "Studencheskaya St., 8, tel. 16-62-10," with the mail address uventa@minolta.nnov.ru[1]. The Wayback Machine holds nine captures of the site: the first dated 23 August 2002, the last 20 November 2003[2]. The site entered our survey of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet from the nn.ru portal directory.
What the home page looked like
The only surviving snapshot of the home page dates to 20 November 2003. The page layout was typical for a corporate site of the period: a header with the company name "Yuventa," a site search box, and a feed of short items under the heading "News in one line," where each entry was dated and ended with a "Go" or "More" link[1].
At the top of the page, next to the company name, three organizations from other cities were listed: "Dimi-Center (Moscow)," "ZAO Miros (St. Petersburg)," and "ZAO DiMi (Kursk)"[1]. The same circle of names recurs in a news item from 23 September 2003: as the home page reported, "on 11-12 September Nizhny Novgorod hosted the first dealer seminar of the company 'DIMI-DOS'"[1].
Worth noting is the mail address: incoming mail was handled by a mailbox in the domain minolta.nnov.ru — that is, the company's official mail lived on a different domain from the one hosting the site[1].
What Yuventa offered
The product range and current offers can be read from the news feed of autumn 2003. On 21 September there was an announcement of "a significant reduction in prices on machines in the Promotions section"; on 22 September a promotion was announced for new digital technology: digital Di 152 machines were offered at the price of the analog EP 1054. A "Vacancies" section appeared on the site the same day[1].
An entry from 1 October 2003 reported that the company "Minolta-QMS Europe (Konica Minolta Printing Solutions)" was running a special promotion, "With Konica Minolta you are armed!", for the sale of laser printers; the promotion's term was printed on the page as "from 1 October to 31 November 2003" — with a nonexistent end date[1]. The double name of the manufacturer in this line reflects the moment when the Minolta brand was already transitioning to the merged name Konica Minolta[1]. The last two feed entries are the latest surviving traces of the site's activity: on 11 November 2003 a "new Magicolor 3300 color laser printer" was announced, and on 12 November, "new digital copiers"[1].
The nn.ru directory described the firm's business more briefly: Minolta copying equipment — sales, service, repair, consumables. The surviving text of the home page does not contradict this: among the internal sections visible on it are site search, "Promotions," and "Vacancies"[1].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
Yuventa belonged to that large layer of Nizhny Novgorod sites that existed for the sake of a single firm and did not seek an audience beyond their own market. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating, the domain uventa.nn.ru does not appear, and no votes for it are recorded in our data; in the published results of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, the site is likewise absent[3] — though by December 2004 it had already gone a year without updates. For more on how the sample is constructed and what follows from it, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.
The site's value for the city's history lies not in its popularity but elsewhere: it records what office-equipment trade in Nizhny Novgorod looked like in 2003 — dealer seminars, manufacturer price promotions, the shift from analog copiers to digital ones.
How it closed
There are no signs of closure on the site itself: the news feed simply breaks off in mid-November 2003[1]. The last snapshot in the web archive is dated 20 November 2003[2]; no later captures of the home page have survived. According to our check, the domain uventa.nn.ru no longer exists, and there is no placeholder page in its place. How many years the firm continued to operate after the site stopped updating cannot be determined from the available materials.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
- web.archive.org — List of uventa.nn.ru snapshots in the web archive (archive)
- web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)