Is that "code" for something?

When I used to think of “coding,” I imagined a black hole in outer space; something I knew very little about, that seemed extremely daunting, and intimidating to even think about. After doing a little research, experimenting with Codecademy, and truly looking the coding giant in the face, I realized that it is not all that scary, and actually super beneficial for digital marketers. While marketing almost always gets a rep for being all about creativity and targeting customers, there are important reasons why learning skills such as coding are surprisingly advantageous.

"“Why can’t I code?” is a question every marketer needs to answer right now."

Here are a few key reasons why coding is a good skill to learn for a beginning digital marketer:

• Enhance you ability to communicate. Developers are not marketers, and marketers are not developers. However, knowing how to communicate is essential to creating successful websites and campaigns. Developers and marketers might speak a different native language, but by having a basic understanding of code, marketers are able to communicate with developers in a much more effective way.
• Understand what you are working with. Coding is almost like understanding how a car works. Most people know how to drive a car, but they do not actually know what truly makes a car start up and go. Knowing how code works gives you enhanced knowledge about the tools you use, which offers you an understanding of your opportunities and limitations. "Grasping what’s even possible empowers you to find inspiration independently, rather than just looking at what others have done."
• More power to make a change. Well, at the very least, little changes. For example, say you want some text bigger, smaller, bold, italicized, or yellow, knowing basic code will let you do all that and more.

"Ultimately, learning how to code will help you collaborate better with partners and customers, identify otherwise-invisible creative opportunities, and engineer campaigns that won’t fall apart on first contact with the audience."

Codecademy Experience

So, my first time coding...let me give you the details about it. Basically I started off with a screen like this, and was a little confused. What was I about to do on here?

I dedicated the next two hours to the Codecademy HTML & CSS lesson and managed to get 25% of the way through it, and ended up with a screen that looked like this. Even though 25% is a small amount of the lesson, by the end of the two hours I felt like my knowledge of coding increased 10-fold. Surprisingly, the lesson was not half as scary or difficult as I thought it would be. Codecademy’s purpose is to teach the beginning basics of coding to its users in the most interactive and simple way possible, and I found it to be just so. The lesson started off slow, and had lots of opportunities to repeat what I had learned. Participating in this lesson was extremely useful, and while I am by no means an HTML or CSS coder, the idea of them is 100% less intimidating than it was yesterday. 

Squarespace Experience

So after learning a little bit of coding, I went into Squarespace to experiment with a hypothetical eCommerce website. I have played around a tiny bit on website templates before, but never on Squarespace. I decided that I would make a water bottle business. Overall I found Squarespace to be a very positive experience. Some of the best things about Squarespace was the user friendly and relatively intuitive design, the attractiveness of the templates, and the comprehensive help pages. On the more negative side, I found a few things on Squarespace to be a little difficult. For example, it took me a good amount of time to figure out if my site was live/published and how to change my domain name. Additionally, I think that the templates can be both a blessing and a curse. While it was super helpful to get an idea of how to structure my site, I think that templates can also can be a little confining. In the end though, I cannot really complain. I was able to create a website with items for sale, that turned out to be relatively attractive and easy to navigate. Props to Squarespace. Here are a few screenshots of the site, and here’s the link. Sorry, but the Agua bottles are still only fictional.

Thanks for reading!