I’ve worked in technology PR for more years than I care to mention and although I’ve accumulated a lot of technical knowledge during this time, fact is, I wouldn’t know where to start if I was asked to configure a network or even write a line of code.
But having just read the following article from Mashable, I’m coming round to the idea of adding a little practicality to my knowledge by learning to code. The article talks about how learning even just a little HTML or CSS can help you achieve some pretty impressive looking web pages or other marketing collaterals.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and it tells your web browser what each part of a website is. Using HTML you can define things like headers, paragraphs, links and images so that your browser knows how to structure your web page.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and this is the language that gives a web page its look and format and offers the user the option to incorporate fancy fonts, exciting backgrounds or animations and 3D effects.
The article goes on to list some of the awesome things you can create using these skills. For example, it enables you to design an impressive looking newsletter template, make effective changes to any website built in WordPress or turn a standard Tumblr template into a work of art.
Then once you’re a master of these two languages, learning JavaScript or PHP becomes a whole lot easier and opens you up to a range of creative opportunities.
This year saw coding added to the curriculum for primary-aged children in a bid to populate our workforce with programmers in years to come. Surely if five to eleven year olds can master a bit of coding there’s hope for me……isn’t there?
Fiona Whyatt has worked in B2B PR for many years. She loves blogging!
