People love stories! Not only those told on TV or in children\u2019s books. Some of the stories of the 21st century are told on Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. Many are personal and users embrace their ephemeral nature. What\u2019s a business to do, though? Most business leaders find it unproductive to create digital assets that don\u2019t last and cannot be linked to and reshared over and over again.<\/p>\n
Creating stories for Instagram or Facebook is only attractive to big businesses who have an army of social media content producers and employ PR and advertising agencies. They can \u2018feed the beast\u2019 with high frequency and produce a constant stream of visually attractive mobile-only content.<\/p>\n
AMP started in 2015, and it\u2019s an acronym that stands for \u201cAccelerated Mobile Pages\u201d. After a lot of meandering and false starts it now has morphed into \u201cAMP \u2013 a web component framework to easily create user-first web sites, stories, ads and emails\u201d. In other words, an open-source initiative by Google and other organizations with the goal to optimise web content to load instantly in users\u2019 mobile devices, and improve the user viewing experience. There is a lot of technology behind this goal, and you can read up about it on the AMP Project\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n WordPress<\/a> partnered with Google early on. In 2017 several WordPress core committers started working for Google to build the AMP Plugin for WordPress. With this commitment to WordPress Google is supporting site owners using open-source software available in 100+ languages and powers over 34% of the internet<\/a>. The AMP Plugin for WordPress allows site builders to adopt a user-first experience without leaving the ecosystem of WordPress. The adjustments to qualify as an AMP site are not small but the plugin helps WordPress theme builders and web consultants to level up their service offering.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t have to use the AMP components in order to take advantage of AMP Stories that come with the AMP plugin.<\/p>\n For those of us not frequenting the mentioned social networks, Stories constitutes visually attractive portrait size content with multiple pages that viewers swipe through on their mobile phones. The content can include images, animation, video and text, if only minimal. For this article, I have put together three examples. If you are reading this on a mobile phone, you\u2019ll have the intended user experience. For those of you reading on your desktop, it\u2019s going to be slightly different.<\/p>\n The documentation of the AMP Project<\/a> at amp.dev writes about Stories:<\/p>\n \u201cAMP stories immerse your readers in fast-loading full-screen experiences. Easily create visual narratives, with engaging animations and tappable interactions. The AMP story format is free and part of the open web and are available for everyone to try on their websites. They can be shared and embedded across the web without being confined to a closed ecosystem or platform.\u201d<\/p>\n If you landed on this article and are not necessarily a WordPress users, the site will provide you with some alternative tools and information on how best to publish AMP Stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n Following the success of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook stories, a couple of years after Google first released AMP<\/a> in 2015, AMP Stories have been embraced by large publishers, like the BBC, Washington Post, and National Geographic.<\/p>\n Here are two examples:<\/p>\n The photo story about the traffic famine in Yemen earned photographer Lorenzo Tugnoli from the Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize. Take a look at the full story here<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nWhat are Stories exactly?<\/h2>\n
Examples for Visual Storytelling<\/h2>\n