sidesign.narod.ru was the business-card website of industrial designer Sergei Ivanchikov, hosted on a third-level domain in the narod.ru zone. The site's connection to Nizhny Novgorod is twofold: its listing appeared in the nn.ru directory, the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, in the section "Firms (Enterprises): Advertising: Design, industrial design, decoration"[4], and in 2004 the site took part in Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day — an annual review of Nizhny Novgorod websites held by the internet company NN.RU[6]. The homepage title was "Industrial Design"[1], while in the contest listings the site was named "Site of an industrial designer"[6].

Dates of operation

The earliest homepage snapshot in the web archive is dated February 16, 2003, and almost none of its text survived — only the title "Industrial Design" remained[1]. But the site had been running earlier: the nn.ru directory page with its listing was compiled on April 25, 2002[4], and on that same day the site also appeared in the catalog list of new resources[5] — meaning it had been added to the Nizhny Novgorod directory shortly before that, nearly a year before the web archive's first visit.

What the site offered

The directory listing enumerates the industries the author worked in: shipbuilding, electronics, automotive tuning, plumbing fixtures, machine-tool building; the same entry also gives the name — "Author of the works — Sergei Ivanchikov"[4].

Continuous homepage text survives only from 2022; by then the page was a short splash screen of a few lines. "Need professional industrial design? Innovation, 3D modeling, prototyping, engineering, molds, promotion of industrial products," it read[2]; below that the site promised turnkey industrial design and "a portfolio of real promotional samples"[2]. A single link led further — "LOG IN"; what lay behind it cannot be seen from the homepage snapshots[2]. At the bottom was the caption "Site powered by uCoz" — the page was built with the uCoz site builder, though the address remained the original narod.ru one[2]. The splash screen showed neither an address nor a phone number[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the voting for the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, the site competed in the "Best Personal Website" category, where votes were collected by email and by SMS. It received three votes by email and none by SMS — line 29 of a list of 37 entries in the category, whereas its leader, "Nizhny Novgorod Extreme on the Internet," had 156 email votes[6].

The directory was linked to the Counter.nn.ru counter — the era's main traffic meter for local sites: sites with the counter installed had a ranking with a link to their statistics next to their directory entry. For sidesign.narod.ru this field read "no": the site was listed in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet directory but did not display its own traffic figures[4]. The selection method and the overall picture of the corpus of closed sites are covered in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

How it closed

The web archive visited the homepage rarely: eighteen times in all, starting February 16, 2003[1]. The three last snapshots — April 2, June 28, and October 4, 2022 — match each other word for word: the page had not changed[2][3]. The archive's last access to the domain is dated October 7, 2022; after that the site disappears from the archive, a probe shows the domain dead, and there is no information of the project moving to another address.

From twenty years of operation what remains is the title "Industrial Design," a Nizhny Novgorod directory listing with a list of industries, and a promised portfolio that now leads nowhere.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, April 2022 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, October 2022 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, section "Firms (Enterprises): Advertising: Design, industrial design, decoration", 2002 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, list of new resources, April 25, 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)