I Built a Global Children's Bedtime Story Platform with Nuxt3: Welcome to BeddyStories.com ✨📖

Hey everyone,

I recently launched a project that I’m really excited about: BeddyStories.com.

It’s a platform dedicated to providing classic bedtime stories from all around the world, supporting multiple languages, and it’s perfect for parents looking for bedtime stories for their kids. Of course, if you’re into fairy tales, you’re welcome to check it out too!

The site has been up for a few months now, and I’d love to share with you all the backstory, tech stack, and some fun things I learned while building it.

👶 The Idea Behind It

It all started pretty simply:

When I was looking for bedtime stories for my little one, I found that it's actually really hard to find clean, well-curated, age-appropriate, and multilingual children's stories. A lot of platforms were filled with ads, poor translations, or were just hard to navigate.

So, I decided to make one myself.

The goal was clear:

Create a platform where children worldwide can enjoy the most classic bedtime stories in their own language.

🌍 What’s on the Website?

If you visit beddystories.com, here’s what you’ll find:

  • A collection of classic children's stories from all over the world: fairy tales, folk tales, fables, and more.
  • Currently supporting Chinese, English, German, and French, with plans for many more languages in the future (Spanish, Japanese, Arabic are next in line).
  • Stories categorized by type (e.g., animal tales, moral fables, adventure stories) and by region for easy navigation.
  • Some stories come with audio versions for easier listening — great for parents and kids to enjoy together.
  • A child-friendly, simple layout with no ads or distractions, keeping the focus entirely on the stories.

⚙️ Tech Stack: Nuxt 3 + Tailwind

For the tech nerds out there, here's what I used to build this:

  • Nuxt 3 + Vue 3: Perfect for building an SSR (Server-Side Rendered) website with great performance and fast page loads.
  • Tailwind CSS: It made it super easy to style the website with responsive designs and a clean, child-friendly layout.
  • i18n (internationalization): Using Nuxt’s built-in i18n module, I made it super easy to handle language switching and translations.
  • SEO Optimization: Each story has its own route and meta tags, which helps with long-tail keyword search results and indexing.
  • Image Compression + Lazy Loading: To optimize for mobile and improve loading times, especially for users outside of the home country.

The whole setup is lightweight, simple, and optimized for content-heavy platforms.

✍️ Where the Content Comes From

The stories on the site come from a few different sources:

  • Public domain classic works (e.g., Aesop's Fables, Grimms' Fairy Tales)
  • User submissions from native speakers (currently, we have contributions from Germany and France)
  • Some stories are AI-assisted for translation, but we manually review and edit every story for quality and readability.
  • Each story is tailored to be age-appropriate and easily understandable for young children.

We care a lot about the warmth and quality of the stories — it’s not just about the words, but about creating a nurturing experience.

💬 Challenges Faced During Development

There were a few tricky things that came up during development:

  • Handling i18n + Dynamic URL Structures: Managing SEO-friendly URLs for different languages while keeping them clean and easy to understand was challenging.
  • Tailwind’s ‘Soft’ Child-Friendly Design: I didn’t want it to look too cheap, but also didn’t want it to be too serious. Finding the balance was a fun challenge.
  • MySQL Full-Text Search: Making sure the "story search" feature was smart and intuitive without introducing Elasticsearch was a bit of a headache, but I got it working well.