getamis.r52.ru was the business-card website of Getamis LLC, a metal-trading company from Dzherzhinsk, which existed in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru from no later than December 2001[1]. The company presented itself as one of the largest metal traders in the city of Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod Region, and dated its work on the Russian market back to 1991[1]. The site was hosted by the Nizhny Novgorod platform r52.ru, and the early version of the pages carried the credit line "Coding by Info-online"[1].

What the site looked like

It was an extremely modest corporate site of a few pages. The home page was titled "Getamis LLC | About the company," and the navigation was limited to three sections: "About the company," "Metal," and "Contacts" — the text of the home page directly pointed the reader to the neighboring pages: "See the 'Metal' page for details" and "Our address and other particulars are on the 'Contacts' page," as the home page stated[1]. There were no advertising blocks, no news feed, and no feedback forms on the home page: its entire content consisted of a paragraph about the company and a list of services.

In the 2001 and 2003 snapshots, two service captions stood at the very bottom of the page — about the coding contractor and about hosting by r52.ru[1][2]. By the March 7, 2005 snapshot, both lines had disappeared from the footer, leaving only the copyright notice "© 2001 Getamis LLC"[3]. No visitor counters are visible in the preserved text of the home page.

What the company offered

The only substantive block on the home page was a list of five items under the heading "SERVICE": pre-sale preparation (cutting metal to the customer's dimensions); delivery of products to the customer by road and rail transport; supply of any batches of rolled metal, "including small ones (from 10 kg)"; the option to form combined orders comprising several types of products; and selection of optimal payment arrangements[1]. The set is typical of a wholesale metal depot that at the same time tries to hold on to the small buyer: the reservation about batches from ten kilograms and the promise of combined orders were addressed not to a factory but to a small workshop or a private individual.

No address, phone number, or company particulars were given on the home page — they were placed on a separate "Contacts" page, the text of which has not been preserved in our material[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site belongs to the mass layer of corporate pages that made up much of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s: a small firm would order a business-card site, place it with a local provider, and never return to it again. In the register of Nizhny Novgorod addresses compiled for the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating, getamis.r52.ru entered from the directory of the nn.ru portal, where the company's listing repeated the first sentence of the home page[1].

The site held no notable place in public ratings. In the preserved table of voting results for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004, the domain getamis.r52.ru does not appear[5]. No entry for this address is recorded in our data for the Counter.nn.ru rating either — which, given the absence of a counter on the home page, looks natural.

How it closed

The fate of the site is unusual not for its events but for their absence. The text of the home page went almost unchanged for nearly two decades: the 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2019 snapshots match word for word in their main part — the same phrase about working since 1991, the same list of five services, the same references to the "Metal" and "Contacts" pages[1][4]. The only discernible edit over all those years was the disappearance of the year from the copyright notice: by 2019 the footer simply read "© Getamis LLC"[4].

The last snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated January 18, 2019[4]; no later copies have been preserved. Thus the site, which appeared online no later than the end of 2001, lasted about eighteen years without a single substantive update.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2019 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)