Create a mobile-optimized website, like an Instagram story

on 11 July 2023, by Bogdan, in Blog, WordPress, Cloud, Guides

by Bogdan

With users consuming tons of content every day, it is increasingly becoming difficult to stand out. As a business, content creator, or marketer, you have to find a way to break through rather than be drowned as just another page or ad that users ignore.

Instead of spending your marketing budget on more ads, you can focus your marketing strategy on web stories. Web stories are an effective way to make your content stand out from the rest and get users to engage with it.

In this post, we’ll look at what web stories are, why they are effective, and how to create a web story using the Brizy Stories Builder. Let’s kick things off by understanding what web stories are.

What are web stories and why are they so effective?

Web stories are mobile visual narratives that blend text, images, animations, and videos to create a fully immersive content consumption experience. Stories are primarily made for consumption on a portrait screen (on smartphones) and they allow users to consume content at their own pace. They can move from one piece of content to the next by tapping or swiping on their phone screens.

Web stories are a web version of the stories format implemented in some popular social apps. Stories started with Snapchat but have now been adopted by nearly all popular social platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Twitter (at some point). Now even websites are using them, so why have stories become so widely embraced in content marketing?

Why are webstories important in content creation?

Storytelling is an incredibly valuable form of marketing as they show potential customers a visual narrative of a relatable problem they might be facing and how a business can solve this problem for them. Web stories are no different but they have an advantage of standing out as a result of how they are presented.

They are highly immersive as they utilize a variety of interactive elements to capture and retain users’ attention. The immersive nature of web stories encourages users to engage with them. All they have to do is swipe or tap to engage with it, which is easy and convenient for them. If you include a call to action(CTA) at the end of it, more users will likely convert.

Apart from being visually appealing, here are a few different ways in which web stories can help you to capture users’ attention and get more conversions on your content.

They deliver content in bite-sized chunks - Web stories deliver content in a short, concise format to avoid overwhelming users with too much information. Modern users typically prefer this format as the content can be digested quickly.
Mobile-friendliness - Web stories are designed with mobile devices in mind, as they are often presented in a vertical, swipeable format that is optimized for smaller screens. Since a majority of web traffic comes from mobile devices, using web stories you can reach out to a large audience.

Overall, web stories offer a unique and engaging format that aligns with users' preferences for visual, mobile-friendly, and easily digestible content. They provide an opportunity for you to tell compelling stories and boost user engagement.

When used correctly, they can become an integral part of your marketing strategy. If you’re looking to create web stories, you can do it for free on Brizy Cloud.

Brizy Web Stories: Create Mobile-Optimized Mini-Websites, like an Instagram Story

Brizy Web Stories is an addition to Brizy Cloud that allows you to create Instagram-like story websites for your users to engage with. Unlike Instagram stories that disappear after 24 hours, Brizy stories stay up as long as you want them to.

With the Brizy Stories builder, you can create mini-websites and link them to the navigation menu of your main website or deploy them independently. These web stories are mobile-optimized as they’re displayed in the portrait view of a smartphone. When users visit your web story, here’s what they will see, something that fits perfectly on a smartphone.

When users click on one edge of the story or simply swipe, they can slide from one piece of content to the next, allowing you to create a visual narrative. Brizy stories are primarily made for consumption on mobile phones, they also work well on desktops.

The interface changes slightly with a navigation bar at the bottom to guide users through the story.

Who can use Brizy Stories?

Brizy Stories are ideal for a variety of professionals. Here’s how creating web stories with Brizy can benefit some of them.

Marketers - Marketers can use Brizy Stories to create mobile landing pages. Stories are great for landing pages since they have a natural funnel, and you can include a CTA at the end of it. They can also use it to present promotions in a way that will grab the attention of customers.

Content creators - They can use stories to create short posts or content previews that summarize a blog post, for instance. This helps to generate interest in the piece of content and interested users can click on the CTA to view the entire post. They can also use it for ‘How to’ content or any other piece of content that works well in steps.

Store/Shop owners - For shop owners, stories can help them to showcase products by displaying product features. They can also use stories to ask clients for testimonials or conduct follow-ups.

With that being said we can now create a web story using the Brizy Stories builder.

How to create an Instagram-like story website

To create Brizy stories, you’ll need a Brizy Cloud account. If you don’t already have one, you can sign up for a Brizy Cloud account here and then log into it. Brizy Cloud Free also has web stories.

With Brizy, you can create a web story as a standalone project or as part of a pre-existing or new Brizy Cloud website. A stand-alone story will give you a URL link for just that story. On the other hand, as part of a website, your story will behave like any other page of your website and you’ll get a permalink for it.

As a standalone story

This option is available in both Brizy Cloud Free and Pro. To create a new standalone story, click on Stories on the projects navigation menu. Next, click on Create New Project and select Story. A new project will be created for you and displayed on the projects list with a number depending on how many story projects you have.

You can name your story project however you want. Hover on the project and click on Edit Project and this will lead you to the Brizy Web Stories Builder.

As part of a Brizy Cloud or WordPress website

This option is only available in Brizy PRO. To create a web story as part of a website hover on the project on the dashboard and click on Edit Project. This will take you straight to the website builder. Access the Brizy CMS by clicking on the top left hamburger menu then click on Stories.

At the bottom click on Add New Story name it and you can also add a description for it. Just below the description, you’ll see the story’s permalink.

Save it and click on the SEO tab to add your SEO information. Click on the back arrow to go back and then click go to Actions to edit the story. This will lead you to the Brizy Stories builder.

The Brizy Web Story Builder

If you’ve used Brizy’s website builder or popup builder, building stories will be very easy for you. This is because the story builder is a watered-down and repurposed version of the website builder. The elements have been reduced and only the conversion-oriented elements are displayed.

That’s not all, building has also been made easier. You can drag elements from the element library and drop them on the page. Once an element is on the page, you can drag it freely anywhere on the page. Instead of drag-and-drop, you can also just click on the element on the element library and it will appear on the page.

Building Stories with the Story Builder

You can choose to build the pages of your story from scratch or use pre-made templates to accelerate this process. When building from scratch you can add elements, one after the other, size them, position them, and so on, just like you would with the page builder. Here are some edits that you’ll be able to make:

Change the text color, size, alignment, and the font.
Upload your own background image to represent your brand and edit its opacity.
Embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or any other source by providing the URL
Add a star-rating element to equip your products with social proof.
Other interactive features such as a map, a countdown, a counter, a progress bar, and so on.

To bring in a template, scroll down and click on ‘Create a New Page’.

In the story template library, you will find over 50 different templates for different categories like business, food, fashion, magazine, and so on. If you’re using Brizy Cloud Free, you’ll only access 7 of them.

Once you find a template that you want to use, click on it and then click on Replace Global Styling and then Import This Story. After bringing in the template you can edit each element to make it truly yours.

When you’re done with one page, you can scroll down and click on ‘Create New Page’ and import another template or build one from scratch. If you want to rearrange the pages, you can simply scroll to the bottom, drag them and drop them where you want each page to appear.

After creating your story, click the Save Draft button on the bottom left. You can also preview your site before publishing it by clicking the Preview button. Doing this will help you to understand where you need to make adjustments.

That’s it! You’ve just created a web story. If you created a standalone story, you can deploy it and share its URL with your users. If you created one within a website, you can use the permalink to link it to your website.

Conclusion

Creating web stories is a great way to stand out in your marketing efforts, capture the attention of users, and get them to engage with your content. With Brizy Cloud’s Web Stories offering, you can create high-converting Instagram-like web stories easily in just a few clicks. You can blend a variety of conventional and special elements to create an immersive viewing experience for your users that will get them interested in your products, services, and content.

Start building secure websites today!

Get Started Now - It's Free

Frequently Asked Questions

YES, Stories is part of Brizy WordPress as well and everything is very similar to how the CLoud version works. Learn more about this here.

Just like stories on social apps, Brizy stories are mainly made for consumption in portrait mode. They won’t work well in landscape mode. However, on desktops, the display will be adjusted and users will have a navigation bar to move from one piece of content to the next.

No, you can’t change the resolution. However, the resolution is dynamic and it will automatically adjust to fit the screen users’ screen sizes.

No, you won’t be able to insert a story as a block on a page, it is a page on its own. For that, you can use a carousel or a blog slider.

Not at the moment, but this is under consideration and it may be included in the next major update.

Article by Bogdan

Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io