Understand Code and Become a Full Stack Marketer

Are you a full stack marketer?

Being a full stack marketer means getting familiar with a multitude of skills and concepts. Full stack marketers are very valuable to startups because they're well rounded individuals and startups are looking to hire people who can create more value for their company. Understanding HTML/CSS/Javascript and how coding essentially works is one of these skills. Luckily for me, I had taken a beginner's computer science class and now I realize how helpful it was! Working with Codecademy was a good refresher for me but I'll get into that later. The image down below consists of some skills and concepts you should get acquainted with in order to become a full stack marketer.

Why should beginning digital marketers learn how to code?

I'm not saying you have to be a coding wizard by any means. (Although, it would probably leverage your value by a lot). But simply understanding the basics of HTML/CSS/Javascript can help you as a marketer to communicate with other members of your team who are native to coding. Coding is a great skill because it helps you to understand why and how things work on a webpage. Here's a little video about what most schools don't teach and if you can already guess, yes, it's how to code.

My experience using Codecademy:

This was an amazing learning tool. (I honestly learned much quicker on Codecademy than I did in my quarter long class). I was really impressed with the helpful hints, examples, and user friendly directions. Here's a little before and after screenshot of my progress.

Two hours later....

I got pretty far and finished off with learning about tables. Being able to know what you did wrong and how you can fix your mistakes is really helpful and Codecademy makes this very easy to do. This is a great program and I recommend it for anyone who wants to learn how to code. (Which I know all of you do!)

My experience using Squarespace:

I chose to create an ecommerce website that sells handbags using Squarespace. This was my first time creating a full blown website so I was very intimidated by the program.

Here's the link to my ecommerce page and a couple screenshots of what I was able to do in half an hour.

After fiddling around with it for half an hour, I could say that it was both a good and bad experience.

Let's start off with the good. It had a beautiful assortment of layouts to choose from. I also liked how it had a blogging option to help promote your products. Squarespace provides a lot of convenient features for the creator such as an inventory tracker and analytics. It also gives you the option to create a logo!

Now for the bad. I thought it wasn't very user friendly. It was very hard to navigate with little to no instruction. You also have to pay to publish your site which I wasn't a fan of. You really have to invest time into the program and play around with all the features in order to get a better feel for what it does.

I hope this helped you develop a better understanding for what it means to be a full stack marketer and learning how to code!

Cheers,

Jasmine