Marketers: Lets Code!
Coding may seem intimidating to some people, including myself. Whenever I see any computer science student working on a code, I think to myself, “what are they even doing…” After learning some basic fundamental elements of HTML, I became less intimidated by coding.
HTML code is used in basically every web page on the internet. It’s important for digital marketers to understand these basic elements of HTML in order to successfully run websites and launch campaigns. Another advantage of knowing HTML for marketers, is let’s say you see something wrong with your website and it’s just an easy fix like a spacing issue, or you want to add an image in a certain place, you no longer have to bug your CTO or web developer friends to fix it because you can do it yourself. You by no means have to be an expert, but you do have to have at least some general knowledge.
HTML
Let's get down to the basics. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, which provides the structure to the content on basically all websites. By using HTML, you can add images, texts, videos, colors and basically anything that can appear on a web page. Within all HTML codes, there needs to be an opening and closing tag. If there isn’t either one of them, then the code will fail. There are elements within the opening and closing tags that can be nested together, almost like an excel function.
To start, you want to have an opening and closing body tag that look like this; (<body>, </body>.) Anything that you type in between the opening and closing tag will be visible content on the web page. Within the body tags, you can add many other elements that play an important role in how your web page looks, like;
- The <p> element means paragraph. Anything you type in between the opening and closing tags will constitute to becoming a paragraph, within the body. Essentially, the body tag is the parent element, and the paragraph tag is the child element.
- There are six ways you can add a heading. For a main header, use the tag <h1>, and after that use <h2>, <h3> ,<h4>, <h5> and <h6> as subheadings for topics. These are used to enlarge text that you want customers to specifically see.
- The <p>, <span> and <div> tags help specify specific text within the web page.
- The <br> creates a break in the line
Within these elements, we can use attributes which help expand the elements tag and give them a sense of meaning when a customer is reading it. Here are some attributes you can use and their meanings;
- The <strong> tag is used to bold words
- The <em> tag is used to italicize words
- If you want a unordered list (bullet points) use the <ul> tag
- If you want an ordered list (numbers) use the <ol> tag
- Within the ordered and unordered list, use the tag <li> to describe the item within the list.
- To add an image from the web, use <img src=”image url”>, where “image url” means to copy and paste the URL of where you got the image from.
All of these examples of elements and attributes can be seen used properly in the picture to my right. Try and look for all the elements and attributes that I mentioned above, and see how they are applied and what they look as a final product.
Codeacademy
Learning to code is easy with Codeacademy. You can sign up for a free week long trial to test the waters with coding. They provide in depth analysis on many languages including HTML and CSS. The lessons they provide can be between 4 to 8 hours. One thing I found helpful that Codeacademy provides is an interactive lesson that gives you the skills necessary to apply HTML elements in fictitious cases. You are given three panels; the panel on the left provides an overview of the code as well as interactive tasks that the user can complete. The middle panel is seen as interactive. This is where the user practices inputting different code elements and attributes. The panel on the right displays what code you entered in the middle panel, you can see in real time how your code would look if it was applied to an actual web page. Codeacademy makes coding easy. The lessons and objectives are broken up into clear segments which allows for things to become easy to follow and understand. If you’re looking for online coding help, I would highly recommend turning to Codeacademy.
Alternatives to Codeacademy
Along with Codeacademy, there are many other online outlets you could go to learn how to code. Some are better than others, so when doing your research you should make sure to read reviews about the specific website your interested in. Skillcrush and Coursera are two great places to start. You can choose from a multitude of courses that can strengthen your understanding and application of coding.
This platform allows you to choose from a variety of courses, to tailor to your exact business need. The courses they offer are; UX Professional, Front End Developer, Visual Designer, Web Developer, Freelance WordPress Developer, Web Designer and lastly the program they advertise the most The Break Into Tech Blueprint course. These courses differ in length time from 3 month programs to 9 month programs. The prices of these courses differ as well from $549 for the 3 month program and $1599 for the 9 month program. Sadly they do not offer a free trial because all the courses are at least 3 month longs.
Yet again, you can learn to code through this online platform. They choose to showcase courses that are offered by many different universities like Johns Hopkins, Illinois, University of Michigan, Duke University and many others. Like most other coding website, they offer a week long free trial. There website is based around a subscription fee where you pay $45 a month to have access to all the coding courses they offer. Some of those are CSS, Javascript, Introduction to HTML and C++. They offer a total of 3,423 courses between 27 countries from 185 university affiliates or partners.
Squarespace vs. WordPress
If you aren’t really the coding type, look to WordPress or Squarespace to create a website for you.
If I was to create a website for my business, I would choose Squarespace. To me, it was very intuitive and easy to use. You could choose a template and from there, directly input words and phrases you want to use in the specific spots your template allows. There are no middlemen when it comes to design in Squarespace. You don’t have to click a button to then edit your site, you can directly edit it. You can also use the analytics tool to track how successful keywords are doing as well as the general traffic that is brought to your site. This platform is not free, but you do get a 14 day free trial. After that, if your a student you get 50% off so you would pay between $12-16 a month versus $24-32 a month for non student users.
WordPress
After playing around with WordPress for an hour or so, my first reaction was, “this is kind of confusing.” I found many aspects of editing and finalizing your website to be not very intuitive to the user. There were lots of things I had to research how to do within WordPress. Comparing it to Squarespace, the templates they provide aren’t as high of quality, but the customization aspect is endless. In WordPress, you can enter your own HTML codes in if you don’t like the existing ones. In the picture to the right, that is exactly what I did. I wanted to test my coding skills to see if i could successfully code in HTML, and like I've said I'M NOT AN EXPERT. It costs $5 a month for a personal site, $8 a month for a premium site and $25 a month for a business. You get what you pay for, so some of the things offered in the business plan would not be offered in the personal account.
In the picture below, this is what the coded picture above looks like on a real web page created in WordPress.
Thanks for reading this weeks blog!!! Have a happy Valentine's Day!
OHSU | Talent Acquisition Partner | NBA Dancer
6 年I’m so proud ??
Growth Marketing Manager | Wasted* PBC
6 年Good article, Ryan. As a marketer with very little coding background this was so helpful!
WA Real Estate Broker | Blue Origin Finance
6 年Great article! I definitely think that the ability to code or know some programming language will soon be a job requirement in many different fields of business.?