Keep Calm and Code
When I first looked over the syllabus for Mark Staton's digital marketing class, my eyes immediately went to section about coding. When I hear the word coding, I think of sitting at a desk for hours on end typing gibberish. In a sense, I was correct. However, coding is like learning a new language and once you understand it you can automatically read it. I can't say I am fluent, but I can edit and understand the basics of coding. If you want to feel more comfortable with coding, I learned on Codecademy for.. drum-roll please.... FREE! Not only was it free, it was easy! It walked me through step by step and I actually preferred learning to code over writing a paper in English. It was new, useful and engaging. I chose the HTML course, and in two hours I learned multiple skills:
- HTML file tags
- How to Title webpages with <head> tags
- <p> tags for paragraphs
- How to make page breaks using <br> tool
- Adding a hyperlink to an image
- Inserting hyperlinks along with a description
- Inserting images
I started my coding journey on Code academy. In two hours, I was able to learn quite a bit. My screen looked like this at the start:
And I was able to code the webpage at the right on the screen below (with the help of the guide):
Nothing special and definitely lacking aesthetics. However I am not so scared of the word coding anymore and feel I can hold up my part of a coding conversation.
Why learn to code?
You can have a degree, graduate in a mountain of debt, and still no one will hire you. Why? You don't have the skills they want. Coding is an extremely valuable skill and programmers make up to $130,000 a year! So you can enroll in coding boot camp for $11,500 or learn for free online. Either way, having the coding skill will put your resume at the top of the stack. Hiring a programmer is costly (as you can see from their salaries), and having the even the most basic understanding of coding can be a valuable asset to a marketer. When people think of marketing the words, design, advertising, promotion may come to mind. Being able to code means being able to dive deeper into all these aspect and perfect them yourself. Having a basic idea of many different skills like: SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, content marketing, blogging, A/B testing and many more skills will allow you to hold your own while doing new challenging project and confidence when you need to learn a new skill. In the case of coding, not having to rely on an expensive developer will save and earn you more money.