Building and Launching Your First Content

To start building content, you have to start a new Creative. However, if you haven't created a sandbox Portfolio yet, go ahead and do that first.

Then, add a testing Campaign within that Portfolio (you can call it "My Ion Studies" if you'd like) and click on that New Creative button to start your very first content.

After clicking on New Creative, choose a Quick Start library, category, and template. 

In case you'd like a recommendation, we suggested you start with the Product Tour Landing Page, the same one we navigated through on the seventh module.

You'll find it under the Standard Templates, within the Landing Page category.

As you learned, applying your company's theme guarantees your content will be built according to its branding guidelines.

So if your standard theme isn't your company's theme yet, or if you have more than one theme available, go ahead and choose the one that you'd like to use when building this content.

Even though the Quick Start template will come with text and some images, try adding new text and images to it as well.

You can delete it later by clicking on the trash can twice. The important thing is that you test dragging and dropping elements into your page.

Then, make sure you edit any existing text and replace some images too. If you need help with dummy text for this first content, here's a website you can use to copy/paste fun lorem ipsum.

Now that you've added, edited, and replaced text and images throughout your page, try applying some micro-themes to them too.

For text, you can apply a micro-theme within the Fonts or Color category, and for images, you can apply an alignment from the Images category.

Next, try adding a new link to the page. If you're using the template we recommended earlier, you'll see it already has a form with a submit button at the bottom of the page.

However, you should try adding and setting up a new link on your own too. So drag and drop the Link component, write down a CTA, then apply a micro-theme from the Buttons category to turn it into a CTA button.

How well does a button that doesn't do anything, right? That's why the next step is adding an Action or Behavior to your new button.

While you're at it, remember to also set up the tag, conversion point, and behavior description if necessary.

Congratulations on making it this far! We bet your content it's starting to come together, but there are still some final touches to make it stand out: blank space and animation.

Remember to add margins and padding to your elements to create those negative spaces that allow your content to breathe. Try using the em unit when doing so for responsiveness.

Next, add a trigger and animation effect to a couple of elements to test them out. Make sure you through different options to see what's available.

We're almost there! Now, you may remember that tags are important to help you better understand how users are navigating through your content, right?

That's why the next step is double-checking every interactive and clickable element on your page to make sure it has a tag applied to it. If doesn't, go ahead and add one.

Before you test your content, try using the Page settings you learned about in previous lessons. Go to the Page tab and double-check the page name and URL—make changes if necessary.

Then, click on the Meta tags and add a page title and meta description to your content too.

One last step before you launch your first experience: testing it out using Preview!

You may remember that with Preview you can navigate through the content putting yourself in the user's shoes to test responsiveness, interactivity, design, copy, and much more. 

Make sure you use the toggle device when testing and check out the collected data.

Congratulations on building your very first interactive experience in Ion! Even though this is not an official experience that you might promote to your audience, you can still launch it with a testing URL to share with others.

To do that, first, change your content status to Engaged on the Creative page.

Keep in mind that you won't be able to change your content's status if you haven't applied your company's theme and are still using a Quick Start theme.

Now that your content is live, it's time to create a URL for it. 

Start by clicking on the "New URL" button. Remember to select a domain and write down a friendly URL path.

On Category and Sub-category, we recommend you choose Offline and Testing, respectively, since this first content was created for testing purposes only.

If you prefer, you can add a new Offline Sub-category, such as "Training", for all the content you'll build while following step-by-step lessons on RockU.

Keep the content you created selected and save your URL to launch your first creative. Remember to copy that URL to share with your team the first experience you built!