Marketers: Learn to Code!
WHY SHOULD MARKETERS LEARN CODING?
Have you ever thought of who is running your favorite websites and apps behind the scenes? A Hubspot Blog said that Coders make it possible for consumers to have a better experience when interacting with websites and apps. Coding is necessary to make great marketing campaigns happen. Since coding is the basis of digital marketing, it would be beneficial for all marketers to learn. In Wade foster’s article discussing skills a full stack marketers should have, coding was an important skill because “A marketer who can get their hands dirty will be much more effective than one that always has to lean on a developer. Being able to edit the copy directly via HTML reposition an element on the page via CSS will let a marketer iterate quicker without distracting the development team.” Learning how to code can make you a valuable player in a company and set you apart from others. A study shows that a very small amount of people who studied business in college have learned coding, doing so will set you apart from the rest. More and more people are learning to code in order to get jobs. Bloomberg businessweek’s article told Katy Feng’s story and why learning to code was an important step in her career. Katy went to Dartmouth studying Psychology and Studio Art and was looking for a graphic design job. When she wasn’t happy with her current job, she took a three month coding crash course to get the job she wanted. Katy isn’t the only one; everyone is learning how to code now. A New York Times article said even people in their 80s are learning to code now!
MY EXPERIENCE WITH CODECADEMY
I have always found coding to be very intimidating, it is a whole other language that I do not understand. Since every little detail matters in coding, I was prepared to be frustrated when I signed up for the Code Academy HTML coding course. Surprisingly, the courses did a very good job explaining how HTML works and why it works the way it does. It was extremely beginner friendly. I was able to follow along with all the lessons because the courses do such a good job of holding your hand through the modules. My favorite aspect of the courses is that they are interactive. The left side of the screen gave definitions and examples, and you can put what you just learned to use on the right side by coding the examples that were given. Just reading about coding can be confusing, but what really helped me learn was typing in the codes in the middle columns and clicking run, this way I saw how the codes affect the website on the right. I also found the quizzes particularly helpful to test your knowledge after finishing a module.
The HTML course takes around three hours to complete. I spent a couple hours on the course and learned a lot. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and it is the language used to define structure and presentation of raw text. HTML surrounds the raw text with information that the computer can interpret. By using the code <!doctypehtml> it communicates to the computer that you are using HTML language. This should be in the first line of HTML docs and it refers to HTML 5. With HTML, most codes require opening tags and closing tags. <p> is the code for a new paragraph, but when that paragraph ends, the closing tag is </p>. This also goes for other codes such as <head> and <body>. While most codes require opening tags and closing tags, a self closing tag is a tag that does not need a closing tag and an example of this would be the break code <br/>. Throughout the course I also learned the importance of whitespace and indentation to make it easier to read codes, how to add comments in code, different types of headings, bolding fonts, how to apply italic fonts, create bullet lists, numbered list, and adding links to images and videos.
I highly recommend playing around with these course, I had a lot of fun taking them. Happy Learning!
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Hmmm...interesting article. Any other resourses for someone for has tried code academy and is looking for other resources?