What coding can do for you as a digital marketer

Intro to Coding:

When I heard that we were going to be discussing coding I was excited, but also knew that learning coding could be a daunting task. Coding is something I only had limited experience with as an elective in 8th grade and around the days of good ol' Myspace. I still remember turning in my final project on Lost on a floppy disc and from what I remember, it was a very confusing and stressful class. Way back in 2007, the advancement of coding and its capabilities were nowhere close where they are today. Nowadays there is free online coding training available as well as intensive coding bootcamps that could cost anywhere from $9000-$11,000 to help prepare people for a potential career in coding. Code Academy provides a great introduction into coding and allows you to see if its something you may want to consider for a career. The best part is that its FREE to sign up!

Code Academy offers lessons to help improve your web developer skills as well as your coding language skills. For our class, we went through the HTML & CSS course and we were to stop after two hours and see how far we had gotten. 

Once I started going, I really got into it! I got about 36% of the way through but definitely want to keep going. It was so cool to do all the coding in the dark grey section titled test.html and then be able to see the results as they would appear on a webpage in the smaller white box where you see the red, blue and green. As you go through the tutorial, Code Academy offers hints if you are struggling in certain areas and was very help at times where I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. Throughout my lesson I covered everything from linking pictures to webpages, to making tables on a webpage, to adjusting font size or making a font bold or italicized. I highly recommend checking this site out and giving it a try even if you know absolutely nothing about coding, and even after a few hours you will have a much better grasp of how websites work.

So if your a digital marketer, is coding a good skill to have?

From the two hours of coding that I went through on Code Academy, I would definitely say that coding would be a great skill to have as a digital marketer entering into the job world. It's not only a valuable tool to have in the digital marketing world, but also makes it much easier when communicating with software engineers. By even having a base knowledge of the coding terminology and how things interact in HTML, you will at least be able to contribute more valuable insight than if you had no experience at all. So even if you aren't in marketing it is a worthy skill to have!

The pros and cons of Squarespace:

After learning about coding, I went on to check out Squarespace and how easy it would be to set up an e-commerce cite. What is nice about Squarespace is that it allow you to start off with a free trial to see if their website layouts fit to the goals your businesses website is trying to accomplish. As you would expect, the free trial gives you bare minimum access to what you can do to the website or if it is published, but once you upgrade your account you get access to much more.

For e-commerce sites, they provide plans for new businesses as well as more established businesses. The incentives they provide compared to other website building sites seem to be better for the quality service that they provide. For my free trial, I made some adjustments to an e-commerce site and will continue to play around with it to get a better sense of how Square Space works.

I decided to brand my "business" as Uht & Co. since my last name is German and short enough that I thought it may work well for a brand name. I played around with the design setting and made a logo and changed the font in the heading. I also changed the background image of a scenic hillside and glacier in Iceland where I hope to camp this summer! It was really cool that Squarespace allows you to do some coding as well in the advanced settings of the website. I tried messing around with bolding, or <strong> in coding language, and will try doing some more. Overall, Squarespace is a great site for beginners and pros alike, and the design and sleekness of their webpages attract the eye and make them stand out from others. The only cons I could find was that it took a while navigating around and figuring out how to change so many things on a pre-formatted webpage. It seems like to set everything up like the examples that they give would take hours, if not days to make it perfect. Heres a link to what my SquareSpace looks like so far! https://austin-uht.squarespace.com/config#/|/