As we move further into the digital age, technical skills such as coding are becoming extremely sought after in marketers. If you can make changes to your website on the fly, that means you can lean less on your development team. Not only will the development team thank you, but you will be a much more efficient marketer. Coding is essentially learning an entirely new language. That may seem like a daunting task, but there are tools available that make learning coding as easy as possible. I have been messing around on Codecademy, and I thought I’d share my experience on the platform.

Codecademy has been used by over 45 million people to learn coding. There are different lessons based on what skills you’d like to acquire, what career path you plan on going down, or what coding language you are interested in learning. I started the Introduction to HTML course. I appreciate how interactive the course has been. Instead of reading large blocks of text followed by a quiz, the course walks you through each step in creating your own website. It starts with basic information such as breaking down the anatomy of a language as shown below.

You then learn how to utilize these skills by creating a website. You start with adding in headings, and then blocks of text, and finally media such as pictures and videos. Here is what the finished project looks like after this first course.

Codecademy offers a free 7 day trial, and I would recommend checking out their full website. It seems to be a very helpful resource to learn coding.

Although learning coding is valuable, the truth is that most consumers will never have the drive to learn the language of coding. For those consumers, there are tools such as Squarespace and WordPress that have proven to be viable website builders. If you really want to build your own website, you shouldn’t let coding get in your way. Squarespace and WordPress require absolutely no coding experience to build a website. Take a look at this screenshot from WordPress. Making this was as easy as choosing a “blog” format and selecting some preset designs. I also appreciate how WordPress gives you a preview of how your website will look on mobile.

After building the website of your dreams, there are different purchase options on WordPress depending on what type of domain you have built.

Squarespace is another good option for a website builder that requires no coding experience. Squarespace not only requires no knowledge of coding, but also comes packed with built in tools such as SEO optimization, email campaign tools, and analytics tools. Squarespace is extremely simple to use, as you start by selecting from a huge list of website templates.

Once you have selected a template, you can easily play with the design of your website by choosing different fonts, dragging and dropping pictures, or even playing with the spacing of things. There are commerce tools available to build an e commerce website, as well as the analytics tools I mentioned earlier.

Coding is something I would highly recommend checking out. It can increase your market value, and it is a skill that will only be more needed as we move into the future. For those who aren’t interested in coding, you can still take advantage of tools such as WordPress and Squarespace to build your own website. Good luck out there in the world of coding, I hope to eventually learn more myself. Hopefully I will report back in the future with all of my newly acquired knowledge. Until next time!