ReDrew Innovations

I will first start by saying, learning to code is not as nearly hard as it seems. Codecademy has a great course on HTML Markup language that is very beginner friendly. The quizzes aren’t free, but the lessons are! So, it’s a great way to dip your toe into coding in a very digestible manner for beginners. But why should marketers even know the basics of coding?

Should Digital Marketers Know Code?

The answer is yes, especially if you’re looking for differentiation among other job applicants. According to Springboard, an online technology learning platform, learning code as a marketer helps you explore new ways of thinking, solving problems and implement solutions.

Companies are also looking for employees with diverse skill sets and with the ability to understand code under their belt, marketers can position themselves as indispensable because they can work with and manage others who deal with marketing and coding.

Increase Productivity 

With the knowledge of coding, marketers are also then able to solve basic coding issues by themselves. Reducing tedious tasks for developers and the possibility of a bottleneck within the campaign. 

Improved Teamwork With Developers 

 How many times have you had to convince your bosses or a small business that your marketing strategy has bases to create conversions? In that position, marketers must try their best to not only to create strategies to help the business thrive but also educate others on how the strategy will do that. By comprehending coding, you will take that wearing step out of the process for developers because you will already understand the language. This will also help with avoiding miscommunications, save time and money. 

 Understanding the basics of coding will also help marketers to better empathize with the work of a developer. Often, we want others to move at our pace and don’t take into account the technicality that goes into another’s work. 

The Functionality of Codecademy vs. WordPress vs. Squarespace

Link mentioned above, Codecademy is an interactive platform that offers free coding classes to help build technology platforms from the ground up.

WordPress is a content management system that helps users build websites and similarly, Squarespace is a website building and hosting company.

They differ most obviously in the fact that Codecademy teaches you how to build a website from the bottom up, with an understanding of programming languages and makeup languages (HTML, CSS, Java, JavaScript, Sass, etc.…). Whereas WordPress and Squarespace is a little more user-friendly because they have premade website templates where choosing to customize the coding is optional. 

With Codecademy I walked through the basics of understanding HTML markup language to understand the basics of the most widely used Markup language. Markup language is a computer language that defines the structure and presentation of raw text. By right-clicking on any website, you’ll see an inspect tab appear which shows any user the code that went into building that webpage. 

In the Codecademy HMTL course, I was able to learn the basics of that coding. For example, Codecademy walks you through the breakdown of an HTML element which is a piece of content in an HTML document. You get to learn how to emphasize and bold text on a webpage using coding, and how to insert images and videos while also adding alt text all via coding.

With WordPress and Squarespace, the bulk of the coding is done for you especially if you choose to use a premade template. As you can see below WordPress and Squarespace makes it significantly easier to customize text, format your website and add images and videos compared to creating a page from the ground up using Codecademy! 

However, even though WordPress and Squarespace do the coding for you, users still can customize the coding on the platform if they would like. 

Why Choose Codecademy VS. Sites Like WordPress and Squarespace

You may begin to ask yourself, then why would a marketer every choose to learn HTML Markeup Language over easy to use sites like WordPress and Squarespace? Well the answer is because you:

• get greater control over your webpages

By including only the features you want on your website and leaving out the features that you don’t want. By doing this, only relevant code will be applied to your webpages which will help to with site speed!

• Improve SEO
• Improve usability

Conclusion

Yes! Marketers should know code. Especially if you would like to differentiate yourself and provide value to your team and compay!