yellowpages.nino.ru is the city business directory "Nizhny Novgorod Yellow Pages," launched in 2000 on the nino.ru domain. It is one of the domain's earliest projects: the web archive took its first snapshot of the home page on July 13, 2000 [1]. By 2003 a different site had taken its place at the same address — that of the web studio Grafit, which had built the directory — and its pages show today who was building the Nizhny Novgorod internet in the early 2000s [2].

The directory

It was laid out like paper yellow pages transferred to the web: an alphabetical index of categories (addresses of the form /php/rubric_alph.phtml?first=А), pages for the categories themselves, an "About the Project" section, and an "Add" form through which an organization could ask to be listed [1]. A banner rotated at the top — a separate script, /cgi-bin/banner.cgi, with a random number in the address so that the browser would not load the image from its cache.

In August 2000 the directory's banner sat in the "Our projects" block on the home page of the provider, alongside the school project "Terra Incognita" and the "Partnership Council" [3]. In other words, the directory was not a tenant renting space but a project of the company itself.

The second occupant of the address: the Grafit studio

By the end of 2003, the address was serving a site titled "Grafit" — a Nizhny Novgorod web studio that had been operating since 1998 [2]. Its portfolio reads like a list of early Runet clients: the website of the Union of Right Forces party and its faction in the State Duma; VolgaTelecom, "one of the largest telecommunications operators in Russia"; the computer company Vostok-NN; the International Association "Union of Designers"; the Oka Food Plant; the Nizhny Novgorod Research Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics; a remake of the project "Periscope — web production news in Nizhny Novgorod"; and a remake of that very same student portal from the neighboring subdomain [2].

The most prominent entry on the list is from September 2002: the studio built the official website of the Nizhny Novgorod Region Government at government.nnov.ru, the predecessor of the current government portal [2]. Sites for the Volga-Oka telephone company Ekofon and for Kirovenergo were built at the same time.

The studio also had its own site management system, Treegraph, with which it took part in the "Choosing a Site Management System" campaign run by the Business-Site.ru project in June 2002 [2]. The same system ran on neighboring sites in the domain: its files survive on the cycling site and on a school project, and it had a separate subdomain of its own, treegraph.nino.ru.

By 2006 the site was called "Studio Grafit," carried news from its clients — the city's first credit bureau, the "J" brand for VolgaTelecom's ADSL access, the website of the plastic card manufacturer NovaCard, the MTS "Grand Prix" promotion — and gave the phone number (8312) 33-83-87 and a login for clients [4].

How it ended

The last snapshot of the address is dated May 18, 2007, and only 821 bytes remain in it — that is, the page no longer displayed anything [1]. By then the directory had not been updated for several years: its place in the city had been taken by the nn.ru catalog and the first search maps.

The web archive has preserved 7,692 addresses from Yellow Pages — the fourth-highest result among all the sites of the nino.ru domain [1].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — The Grafit studio's site at yellow pages.nino.ru, snapshot of December 30, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page of nis.nnov.su with the "Our Projects" block, snapshot of August 22, 2000 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — "Studio Grafit," snapshot of June 13, 2006 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page of the directory, snapshot of November 1, 2000 (archive)