Digital marketing has taken off as one of the most important fields in business today. If you or your company are not investing in skills to boost your brand online, you’re going to lose out on opportunities to your competitors. One part of this new approach to business that confuses many people is the programming itself. Here is what you need to know:
Quick Links
HTML: The Backbone
The first and most important part of code that you must know is HTML. It is the backbone of the web. From the first days of the internet, there needed to be a standard way for computers and browsers to understand how to display a website. Every element, from a button, to text, to backgrounds, needs HTML to be displayed.
This markup language is not difficult to learn, but it will take some time. Once you understand the basic building blocks like paragraphs, images, and forms, you’ll be able to build basic sites from scratch. While there are powerful platforms that help you eliminate the manual step when you understand the reasoning behind it you can jump in and fix errors fast.
Another reason that HTML is so important is that it is used by everything else. JavaScript and CSS, which we will get into below, call on HTML all the time. When you understand how it is structured, it makes all your other programming tasks that much easier.
That is not to mention that if your HTML is not tagged right within SEO standards, your site is not going to rank organically as you want it to. You need a certain amount of keywords in your title, h1, and h2 tags, which all fall under the HTML concepts.
CSS: The Coloring
If HTML is the core component of digital marketing, then CSS is the exciting colour that you can add to it. After all, people are very visual creatures. Long gone are the days where they would simply buy something made only of text and bad graphics.
Today’s users are on social media and they see beautiful visuals all day. They expect a good company to have an amazing web design that is easy on the eyes and fun to use. So if you can apply CSS to change colours, sizes, and behaviours, you will achieve an interactive page that is not boring, but engaging.
JavaScript: The Power Player
Only time will tell, but many industry pros are saying that JS will rule the web in the near future. The reason is that it is so flexible. Out of all the core languages to build digital marketing funnels, it is the one that can interact with all the rest. You can make a call to CSS or HTML to do the same function while typing less.
The reason behind this is due to the abstract nature of JS. It has been simplified. Instead of typing hundreds of lines of code, you can type just a few to get amazing results. However, you should ground yourself in basic programming principles first.
PHP: Legacy
If JS is the new kid on the block, then PHP is the old and established veteran. All sorts of companies, from restaurants to medical practices, use this code on their backend to connect to servers. It keeps their data safe. Without PHP, you would not be able to call the database and get a user’s password and login information to let them on your site or to order from you.
When it comes to online advertising, you can leverage your money to go farther than any other channel. However, this assumes that you or someone on your team knows about the coding that supports it in the first place. After all, without HTML, CSS, and other languages, nothing would be possible on the web. So understand the core concepts above and keep them in mind in your marketing.