What is stamate?
stamate is a text-only—or text-mainly—web agency. We do the same things as a regular studio, sans pictures. We do text-only sites, newsletters, FTP (dare I say Gopher?) directories, mobile sites, RSS feeds, we write copy, compose e-mail signatures—anything that goes around text.
But who needs plain-text services?
Who doesn't? Would you have your visitors load 10 images on a mobile phone just to grab a phone number?
I've subscribed to countless subsequently ignored newsletters: they looked bland, in all their full color glory. The only newsletter I read is plain-text. Some of the most used and interesting sites on the web have very few images: Google, Wikipedia, The Rotten Library.
Sometimes it's the content and the swift presentation that matters more than eye candy.
Can we suggest some possible applications?
Mobile sites: too obvious to detail.
Transaction emails: automated responses to acquisitions, account changes, notices, reminders. Very often these are done in a hurry by a close-to-deadline developer, without proof-reading or attention to logic.
Newsletters: designing newsletters is twice as hard, compared to websites. There is limited support for scripts, multimedia and even CSS. Some clients block images by default. Still, most companies' idea of communication by e-mail is stitching together three large flyers with links on them. Even the simplest ASCII cartoon has more appeal than these.
Download sites: organize your software properly, stick a search engine to it, put it live and mirror it, that's all it takes to build a driver download website. However, most companies regard these as appendices to their brand site. The result: countless hours to track down the driver for your mobile broadband modem.
Do we think we will have any clients?
Well, we don't care that much. stamate is an offshoot of Pukka, a full-blown, AJAX and Flash powered agency. It's not our core business, but rather market testing for things we'd like to do more often.
That shouldn't stop you if want to say something. Have you exhausted your communication possibilities? Can anyone reach you and do it quickly?