The Convenience of Coding, and Why You Should know HTML & CSS as a Digital Marketer

Back in high school, I mainly focused on taking classes that were fun, or full of my friends. I wasn’t too concerned about the classes being useful in my future.

However, there was one technology class in particular that I had completely forgotten about altogether until I suddenly decided to try out something I’d never even considered before: coding.

When looking further into this subject, I realized that I have in fact already done some basic coding for an old class project, which was really exciting! But, my main question was this: When am I ever going to need this in marketing?

LOOKING FURTHER INTO THE LAND OF CODING

There has been a lot of discussion on whether or not knowing how to code is beneficial to the current digital marketer. Some have argued that coding is not relevant to a marketer’s daily routine at all, and that it should be left to those who went to school for the trade, while others are claiming that even a base knowledge of coding could be incredibly beneficial to marketers in this day and age.

I decided to try out coding after reading this article from Bloomberg Businessweek that brought attention to the thousands of college graduates that are flocking to online coding courses in order to increase their chances of getting a job (not the most uplifting article to read in the midst of your senior year… ).

I did some research on a few different free online courses and finally landed on Course Academy, an online platform that offers free beginning coding classes on subjects such as HTML, CSS, and more (we’ll discuss what all of this is in a bit).

For those of you who have already used Code Academy before—listen up. Some of their courses have changed as of August of this year, so any progress you may have had through these courses is most likely gone (argh!). However, Code Academy’s new set up is actually really helpful in that it offers a specific course for each of the different elements of basic coding.

For the sake of time, I decided to spend about one hour on the Learn HTML course and another hour the Learn CSS course. I chose these two courses due to the fact that most experts have said that these are the two most valuable aspects of coding someone just dipping their toes in the subject should get to know.

Here’s what the beginning of the Learn HTML course looked like:

Code Academy splits your screen into three sections:

• On the left, you have an instruction and information column. Here, I was able to learn more about what I was doing and why it was important.
• The middle section was where I actually made the changes to the code. For this course, the index.html was an example of what it would actually look like if I were typing in codes into the back end of a website.
• The right-hand column was a visual representation of what the output was from my inputs in the index.html column. Here, I could see how my codes were displaying themselves on the public webpage.

After spending an hour on the course, I switched over to the CSS course. I didn’t include an ending photo of my progress for the HTML course because the platform itself looked roughly the same ( I only made it 33% of the way through the course, so there wasn’t much to look at). However, I did include a beginning and ending photo of my progress within the CSS course, mainly because the CSS course was all about the design and visual aspect of coding, so it looked much prettier towards the end of my time in the course!

Here’s what the Learn CSS course looked like on my screen:

Pretty complicated, right? The course started me off on making basic edits to the “Innovation Cloud” webpage that already had CSS written for it, just so I could get a feel for how all of the different styling techniques worked. Then, we transitioned over to the “Top Vacation Spots” page, where I applied everything I had just practiced separately into one webpage. After about an hour, this is what I ended up with (again, not much change other than font style, size and color, but hey, I’m a beginner!):

Through both of these classes, I learned a lot of terminology. Here’s some of the more important terms I took away from each course:

LEARN HTML

·        HTML: “Hyper Text Markup Language”, or the language that defines the structure and presentation of raw text in coding

·        <! DOCTYPE html>: This should be placed at the very beginning of your code, as it declares to your browser what language you’re using whilst writing this code

·        <html> and </html>: These tags identify the beginning and ending of your code; anything between these two tags will be interpreted as HTML code

·        <p> and </p>: These tags define paragraphs. Anything between them will show up on the webpage as text

·        <head> and </head>:  The tags that contain “Metadata”, or all of the behind-the-scenes information you don’t want showing up on your actual webpage, such as font styles and colors, as well as personal code comments

·        “Element”: both beginning and ending tags and anything in between, such as text

·        “Nested element”: a nested element is any element that lives within the string of another element. A nested element can also be called a “child” of another element.

·        Whitespace: spaces used by coders between each line in order to better see and understand a code

·        Indentation: Similar to whitespace, this is a trick coders use to better see where another element starts. If a nested element is in a code, indenting it would be a good trick in order to better understand its position within the code.

LEARN CSS

·        CSS: Cascading Style Sheets, or the language that is used to style HTML. You can write CSS directly into HTML by using “inline styles”

·        “Inline styles”: a quick way to directly style an HTML element

·        <style> and </style>:  the beginning and ending tags that declare what style is being used, such as font color, size, and type. These tags must be within the <head> tags

·        “CSS file”: a separate location where you can write all the CSS code needed to style a page without sacrificing the readability of your HTML file (the opposite of writing it directly into HTML, or inline style)

So now that we know the basics of how a coding crash-course works, why is it important at all to know? Well, there are many reasons!

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR DIGITAL MARKETERS TO KNOW SOME CODE?

Even after spending only a couple hours learning the most basic aspects to coding, I still feel as though I learned a lot about the idea of coding in general. I may not be an expert, but I definitely have a much better idea of what coding looks like in general, and how to read it.

As a current marketing student, I’ve spent a lot of time studying the idea of a “t-shaped marketer”, or someone who has a basic understanding of most subjects in addition to a couple in-depth specialties. By being a marketer that not only understands all aspects of marketing, but subject as separate from marketing as coding, you have a much better chance of communicating more clearly with your entire team, allocating your budget to maximize profits, and making more informed decisions.

A marketer who does not understand at all what it is that their coding team does is a marketer in the dark. Communication will suffer because there is less of an understanding between those involved. If, however, a marketer has a basic knowledge of coding, he or she can easily discuss what it is they want done and confidently know that their coder is capable of doing so because he or she knows that it is possible in the first place within the world of coding. Simply put, the marketer and coder are able to “speak the same language”.

 This also cuts out any over-reliance on the person coding for a business. If the main marketer knows the basic of navigating through code and how to make simple changes, he or she can do this whenever regardless of if the coder is available or not.

Coding can be expensive. If you as a digital marketer know how to write basic codes, it can save you a lot of time and money that would otherwise be invested in someone else that hopefully knows what they’re doing.

Making informed decisions to better optimize a business’s potential is a great responsibility of a digital marketer. By knowing some information about coding, a digital marketer has a better idea of what is currently possible, and what they could potentially do in terms of innovation and filling that niche before any of his or her competitors do. More channels become available to a digital marketer if they know what kind of code is necessary to use those channels. Stronger, more fluent campaigns will result from these more informed decisions because the digital marketer responsible for them knows that his or her codes are put together well enough to make UX and UI flow much better for the customer.

Knowing code will aid digital marketers in deciding what platforms and types of business professionals they will want to work with in the first place.

I cannot stress enough how important it is for a digital marketer to get to know even just a little bit of code. Doing this will help them become a more well-rounded and capable communicator and decision-maker.

I’m planning on returning to my courses within Code Academy now that I’ve learned a little more about the benefits of knowing how to code as a digital marketer. Feel free to start your own coding journey here, and make sure to share the Code Academy link with anyone else that you think it may be useful for—I know I will!

To read even more about the pros of digital marketers getting to know code, check out this article from TEXT100 and this blog post on HubSpot.

And finally, your lesson of the day: convince your children, siblings, nieces, nephews, etc. to take that tech class they never thought they would have any use for—you never know when it’ll come in handy!

Cheers,

Aubrey McNeil