zodchy.r52.ru was the website of Zodchy (Zodchy, "Architect"), a Nizhny Novgorod construction firm that operated in the regional domain zone r52.ru. The company built in Nizhny Novgorod and in 23 districts of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast; its office was located at 603086, Nizhny Novgorod, Manufakturnaya Street, 14, unit P1, telephone (831) 246-69-83[1]. The Wayback Machine began taking snapshots of the home page in March 2001[2]; the last snapshot in the web archive is dated 18 February 2020[3], and the domain no longer responds at that address.

What the site looked like

The surviving snapshot shows a small corporate business-card site. The top menu had three items — "Home," "Contacts," "Site Map" — with the phone number +7 (831) 246-69-83 placed alongside them. The main navigation was divided into five sections: "About the Company," "Certificates," "Projects," "Services," "Contacts." The home page combined a story about the firm and a list of recent projects into a single feed; the footer carried the postal address and the copyright notice "© Zodchy 2014"[1].

The text of the "About the Company" section in the snapshot is noticeably older than the page itself: it counts fifteen years of the firm's work and speaks of 2002 as recent, while the projects listed lower on the page are dated December 2014[1]. There are no visitor counters or advertising blocks on the saved page.

What the firm said about itself

As the home page stated, Zodchy was "created on the basis of a design-and-construction cooperative founded in 1988, and works in the Nizhny Novgorod construction industry." According to the site, the staff included five employees holding the title "Honored Builder of Russia." The firm owned construction equipment, machinery, vehicles, and production facilities, and in 2002 it introduced the ISO 9000 quality system and took up a new line of work for itself — residential construction[1].

Among its completed projects the site listed a covered market and a mosque in the Avtozavodsky district, a supermarket and two-story garages in the Verkhniye Pechory neighborhood, the reconstruction of the Rossiya cinema and of the Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Commerce, and the development of a residential neighborhood along Kazanskoye Shosse. Among its awards it listed letters of appreciation from clients and from the Nizhny Novgorod administration, the Governor's Standard, and the title of laureate of the "Elite of Nizhny Novgorod Business" competition for 2001–2002[1].

At the time of the snapshot, the "Projects" section contained three entries, all dated 25 December 2014: reconstruction of the OMSN and OMON buildings of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast Directorate of Internal Affairs on Moskovskoye Shosse, 294 "V"; "Reconstruction of the regional center of the canine service of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs Main Directorate" on Moskovskoye Shosse, 386A; and a ten-story dormitory for small families in the Sovetsky district on Mokhovaya Street, between houses No. 15 and No. 9/2[1]. This is the last thing known about the firm's work from its own website.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site made our list from the directory listing of nn.ru, where it appeared with a description different from what the home page itself said: the directory called Zodchy a design organization performing multi-profile design work for construction sites, whereas the site itself spoke primarily of construction and reconstruction.

Zodchy was not a notable participant in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet. The site does not appear in the results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004[4], and it does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru ranking — for more on the methodology behind this data, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. This is the ordinary fate of a corporate business-card site: such sites lived not by audience or traffic but by the mere fact of the firm's presence online, and they did not take part in public rankings.

How it closed

The web archive holds snapshots of the zodchy.r52.ru home page for almost two decades — from March 2001[2] to 18 February 2020[3]. In substance the site stopped earlier: the last updates recorded in the surviving snapshot date to the end of 2014, and from then on the page showed the same three projects[1]. No record survives in our materials of the firm closing or of the site moving to another address; all that is known is that the domain zodchy.r52.ru ceased to exist.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2018 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2020 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)