Q: What is the most used language in programming?
A: Profanity
Dev Dojo
Coding is something a lot of people don’t know how to do, but it is something you should learn- especially as a digital marketer. Becoming a digital marketer means you need to have a great understanding of, well, the digital world. And this can be complex.
But understanding just the basics of coding is a great advantage in your career. It adds to your toolset and using this knowledge can help you to create better campaigns.
Breaking Down the Basics:
Before you can even begin your destination towards the great world of coding as a digital marketer- let’s break down why it’s even helpful to begin with.
1. Knowing how your technology works helps problem solve.
While it may seem like you need to know to an abundance of coding knowledge to make use out of it, that’s not true. Grasping even the simple underlying concepts about coding allows you to edit webpages to resolve errors on your own. It also lets you test out how different styles would look on your pages with ease.
Being able to make changes and find solutions to minor problems on your own as a digital marketer will save you a lot time. Changing styles, altering images, etc. will be frequent work- and you don’t want to have to redirect every issue to the development team. You can also double-check other’s work when they can’t solve an issue.
Even though you may not understand the depth of coding, you can still be able to catch mistakes that might have been glanced over. Having a fresh set of eyes to look over code errors will help everyone on the team.
2. It gives you a competitive advantage in the job market.
Not many individuals have experience with coding- especially entry-level, new graduates. With that being said, not many have this knowledge in general, because it’s typically not taught to marketing majors.
So, being able to talk-the-talk and walk-the-walk about coding (even if it is just the basics) will make you stand out. It shows not only do you have some skill in this area, but you also took the time to learn it.
3. Understanding the basics leads to better communication.
It also helps address any barriers you may have while working with your web developer co-workers and programmers. This helps you understand how web design works from the functional side and what all goes into the developer’s work.
This makes for great understanding and conflict resolution as you learn how complex coding can be and how long it can take. Learning some coding also helps you communicate better regarding what you want design-wise and explain errors better to your co-workers.
Now with that covered- let’s move ahead to the nitty-gritty.
Three + One
Three plus one is the foundation of understanding coding as a digital marketer. This simply means three coding languages plus one database.
What are coding languages? What is a database?
Languages
What is a language? Seems pretty self-explanatory, right? Wrong. But for the basic breakdown, it will be pretty simple.
So, languages are essentially the directions that developers (or digital marketers, wink-wink) give to computers:
“Put simply, programming is giving a set of instructions to a computer to execute. If you’ve ever cooked using a recipe before, you can think of yourself as the computer and the recipe’s author as a programmer. The recipe author provides you with a set of instructions which you read and then follow. The more complex the instructions, the more complex the result!”
Code Foundations Career Path
These languages to us are represented by some sort of character that we understand. There are languages of emojis, even. But in terms of the computer, it will read these symbols into lines of 1s and 0s- called binary. This is what the computer interprets form our character input.
Databases
To keep it easy for this breakdown, a database is used to store and manage your data and information. They store this data in very organized and structured collections- through rows and tables.
Understanding the full depth of databases is a little beyond our basic breakdown right now. But here is a great article explaining everything databases if you’re curious:
https://happycoding.io/tutorials/java-server/databases
HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, with the latest version being HTML5. HTML adds structure to your page.
This is where you will structure your content by paragraphs, bullet points, tables, etc. Your line of content will begin with an opening tag and close with an ending tag. An opening tag explains where the content will start on your page. For example, “<p>” means a new paragraph.
Your closing tag will set where your content ends, such as “</p>”, indicating it ends the paragraph. Ending tags are very important and often an overlooked error to beginning developers and digital marketers.
CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is how you will add style to your pages. Its most current version is CSS3.
This is how you will change the colors, fonts, text sizes, and layouts on your pages. It consists of the selector, declaration, property value, and property. The selector is which element of your page you will be changing. Your property will what characteristic of you element you will changing, such as the color. If you want some text to be the color blue, then you would simply enter blue as a property value.
The property and property value combined are the declaration. To further your knowledge:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web/CSS_basics
JavaScript
JavaScript is how logic will be added to your pages and elements. With this, you can add fun graphics, motions, and interactivity to your page. JavaScript is often used to compliment and add to the HTML and CSS.
A tricky thing about JavaScript is that you need to list everything in order of occurrence for your page. Check out this great how-to instructional page for more:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/JavaScript/First_steps/What_is_JavaScript
Your Database
Some examples of databases are MySQL, SQL, mongoDV, and IBM. Here, you can store data away from your server and have it easily accessible and organized. Databases organize information by rows and columns that make up a table.
SQL
SQL is a very common and stands for structured query language. SQL allows utilizes statements to format a table. Using “create” you can start a table organized by columns. To add rows to this table you will use the “insert” statement. This adds values to your columns, or rows.
You will also be able to use “select” statements to return certain columns or row values by its content. To update any values, use the “update” statement. This will replace an entered value with your new one.
To learn more about databases and accessing information:
https://happycoding.io/tutorials/java-server/databases
Summarizing the Intro to Coding
Hopefully this introduction into basics helped demystify the secretive world of coding! The key takeaways from this serve as a guide into learning more about coding. Learning even just this backbone of coding knowledge will greatly improve your work life as a digital marketer. This will also help you stand out in a field full of job applicants.
Four key subjects to remember are:
- HTML provides structure
- CSS creates style
- JavaScript adds logic
- Databases will help securely and efficiently store your information
Stay tuned for our next blog on search engine optimization and marketing tips for the digital marketer!
