Most people who learn to read mandarin are children who engage with the language from a very early age. For anyone who hasn't had the good fortune to grow up in a Mandarin-speaking environment, and who comes to the task later in life, its quite a challenge.
One can learn to speak Mandarin without knowing any characters, and using only pinyin to make notes and record vocabulary. But to attain a reasonable level of proficiency in reading text is huge prize worth striving for as it opens up the world of Chinese literature, and gives you insights into the culture and history that no amount of conversation can achieve.
I've been told several times, and read it regularly in forums, that the only reliable way to achieve a reading skill is to learn the characters by following this traditional way. Print off sheets of "rice paper" mi-zi-ge, called that because the page is full of little boxes each with lines at 8 points of the compass, which represents the character for rice 米. Select the character you want to learn, and fill in rows until you've got it. Rinse and repeat for 1000 characters, and you're half-way.
Well, I envy those young enough to have the time and plasticity of memory to be able to make progress with this method. It is undeniably useful for learning the stroke order, but as someone coming later in life to this task, admittedly via several other languages, I haven't made much headway with this "brute-force" approach.
Instead I think there is a different approach by turning these shapes into stories and bring to bear a wealth of (multi-)cultural references such as images, history, culture, science from one's life experiences, which are simply not available to young children. I am sure that many Westerners who have learned to read Mandarin make use of this method to a greater or lesser extent, but there do not seem to be many examples of it that are freely available on the internet.
So in essence this site offers a collection of "stories" with which to help recognise characters and to differentiate similar ones from others. To call them "stories" is undoubtedly to stretch the meaning of the word as many are only about single characters or characters in small groups.
The Chinese language does not lend itself easily to making words or sounds that can link across to English, and a good deal of distortion and manipulation is often required to jump the gaps. Therefore I feel it is necessary to issue the following disclaimer:-
With that out of the way, I hope that some of the ideas here help you to learn and most importantly, to recall these characters when you encounter them in books and texts.