Marketers need to know Code "coding"

Coding is something everyone associates with Computer Science, technology has given us so many groundbreaking inventions thanks to the many people who operate with technology. Some of the biggest and most innovative companies in the world have created products by writing in multiple languages to interact with computers; something known as "coding". With the world moving into the "kinda" new century where technology makes life easier and is truly revolutionary, marketers are also taking advantage of the opportunity to dive into the world of adaptive innovation. While a lot of marketing revolves highly around advertising and as I noted in my previous articles, digital marketers use tools and practices associated with the internet. Websites are crucial for marketing, and websites are written with code! There are quite a few languages out there that are crucial for marketers to know and operate with because they are directly involved in marketing ideas, companies, and products. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript stand out as the top three languages that are necessary for knowing what is going on in the coding world.

Popular Languages for Marketers

HTML.5

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications. HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Aside from the technical stuff, the applications of HTML are vital for understanding how a website works because that is the language used to build the entire website! When marketers understand this language, it becomes very easy to edit the website without having to contact a web developer.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML. CSS is like making movie pictures in color! The ability to make a website pretty is all thanks to this particular language. CSS is designed to enable the separation of presentation and content, including layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple web pages to share formatting by specifying the relevant CSS in a separate .css file, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. This language goes hand in hand with HTML and is responsible for a lot of functions of a website from a more creative aspect which is directly involved in user experience, and directly connected to marketing! Marketers need to understand this just like HTML because it is so involved in a large part of websites.

JAVASCRIPT

JavaScript often abbreviated as JS, is a high-level, interpreted programming language that is also characterized as dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based and multi-paradigm. This language is a little different from HTML and CSS but is also directly involved in a lot technology today, in fact it is one of the most popular languages in the software industry. This language is mainly involved in the actions on the website. Think drop down menu's, highlighted linked when you run your cursor over them, and the best part is that it is easy to learn!

Learn to Code!

CodeAcademy is a wonderful website that guides anyone interested in learning how to code through the whole process of every language that they offer. HTML, CSS, and Javascript are all featured on the website and with a full interactive tutorial. It is a brilliant way of teaching amateurs and professionals how to code, there is no downloadable software necessary for their because the whole interaction is web based. There are three parts to the tutorial involving step by step walkthrough tasks and a thorough explanation for everything that you code and that is required to complete the task. The second part is the interactive space for coding where you actually write the code yourself just like the professionals. Lastly, there is a results space where all your work is produced and you can instantly see the results after running the code. The only problem I see with CodeAcademy is that when you are done with the tutorials and courses you can't really code much aside from the stuff that was provided by the program. I advise many of those who are interested in learning to code and practice it professionally would be to read some books on the languages to really understand what the functions are and how the code operates, very often these books include many, many examples of projects using the code so you learn how it is utilized and applied. Another great and very popular resource is W3schools which is a library of all the syntax's and tags of several languages (back when I was in high school I used it a lot). Now the website offers tutorials on languages like Python or SQL which are vital for marketers who want to work with data.

Building Websites the Easy Way

Back in the 90's and early 2000's many companies and businesses realized how big the internet was going to be and it would be advantageous to be on the web. The only way for them to have a website would be to hire a web developer and create the website, it was very expensive, constantly needed maintenance, and was pretty ugly back then. Today, innovation has pushed the barriers of websites and platforms like SquareSpace, WordPress, and Shopify that literally don't require coding knowledge to create a fully customized and functional website for your business! Marketers now use these platforms to build websites for companies that can do so much more than the ones in the early 2000's and they function very well especially for creating a diverse and comfortable user experience online. The downside of these platforms is that when everyone uses these platforms, it becomes pretty similar to everyone else's and a user is seeing the same website with different content and pictures every time they visit. It is also pretty difficult to create unique functions like interactive areas of the website, kind of like customizing a car on an automotive company's website. A few years ago I created some websites for projects using the Google Sites platform but they didn't involve just Javascript and it is now so outdated because alternatives like WordPress have made sustaining innovations to dominate that market. It's a lot more creative and looks way better. As you can observe, Squarespace makes very clean websites and