Why Coding is an Important Skill for Digital Marketers

Why Should a Digital Marketer Know How to Code?

Coding is what lies behind all great digital marketing campaigns. As digital marketers, it is important to know the basics of digital tools to understand the possibilities of your online marketing campaigns.

With this knowledge, inspiration to create new and innovative tools that truly delight your customers is possible. You'll also be able to make quick fixes on your own, without bothering your web designer to fix a simple image resizing. With a basic coding understanding, digital marketers will feel empowered to enhance their creativity and be able to communicate more effectively with their design and development team.

How Codeacademy, Squarespace & WordPress can help:

Codeacademy

Beginning with the structure of all web pages, Codeacademy's HTML course is a great first step into coding for digital marketers. HTML is the starting point for every website and provides structure to the content appearing on sites, such as images, text, or videos.

Spending time going through Codeacademy's HTML course, I was walked through how to build the content foundation of a website. Elements, headings, divisions, tags, attributes, and many more codes can all be altered to develop the desired appearance of a webpage. As seen in my screenshot below, this is the final outcome of implementing HTML features to build a visually appealing page full of content about Brown Bears.

Codeacademy is a very useful tool that introduces you to the world of coding and walks you step-by-step to learning how to code with HTML.

Squarespace

Squarespace is used to grow your business online. This tool allows you to select different templates to design a website and identify your business goals to build a page that helps you achieve them. Squarespace is flexible, personalized, and easy to use.

Squarespace is aimed mainly at small business owners and allows users with limited web development skills to easily build and manage their own website. It lets you create a website in a web browser without coding, and edit it easily thanks to a user-friendly content management system (CMS).

With optional coding, Squarespace is ideal for small businesses that want to grow their online presence in a visually appealing and easily managed way. They also offer analytics and insights to help businesses optimize their site to meet their goals. In my opinion, Squarespace has superior designs options compared to competitors, like WordPress. As seen in my screenshot above, I created a hypothetical website for a gym, where it was easy to select a design and arrange features to best fit the theme of this business.

WordPress

Similar to Squarespace, WordPress is also a site-building tool. With more ways to edit, WordPress allows users to create a domain, access HTML support, included SEO statistics, and many more advanced features.

In contrast to Squarespace, WordPress requires users to source their own web hosting?and use coding. WordPress can hold and manage more data but requires more technical skills than Squarespace does. These additional skills allow WordPress users to further customize their site. With the same hypothetical gym, above is a screenshot of a site I made on WordPress, where I was able to position and edit each aspect, but found it to be a lengthier process to alter colors and fit images correctly.

How can Digital Marketers use these Tools?

Codeacademy is how a digital marketer can build a website from scratch through coding, while Squarespace and WordPress offer pre-made templates to easily customize sites with optional and mandatory coding skills. Altogether, each site offers valuable tools and knowledge for digital marketers to make the best decisions to optimize their site.

For beginners, using Squarespace to build a site that is easy to manage and set up is ideal to get an initial business presence on the internet. With time, investing in learning how to code with Codeacademy is what can take your site to the next level. Implementing this knowledge to build your own site, or enhance the customizable features on Squarespace or WordPress can widen the possibilities for impactful digital campaigns.