I can code! A little.

*This post is in no way a html or css tutorial.

The first few months after graduating, I looked for jobs that did not require website maintenance. I had learned marketing with a mix of writing and a little bit of graphic design. I did not learn how it all looks on the “unseen” parts of a webpage – the side with the codes.

Coding scared me. It is an entirely new language. Maybe it wasn’t all zeros and ones anymore, but it still looked complicated. Also, my husband plays with different code languages and often looks frustrated while doing so, despite his experience.

This week I realized that I have been learning the basics of html and css for the past seven months. In fact, I feel very comfortable flipping to the code to fix issues that I cannot fix in the common user-friendly editing page.

It started with the need to fix links or formatting in the code of my client’s newsletter because my edits on the “visual” side weren’t working. Then came.a request to match an event color scheme to content on a website for that event.

After a brief tutorial on reading in html, I found the coded text and realized there was a pattern. It was pretty easy to plug in various tags and css styles to make whatever changes I needed!

I am still unfamiliar with the lingo, but I feel more confident playing with the code to see what it can do. I would encourage other novice content managers to look up quick tutorials, too! After all, if we’re going to write content for our clients’ websites, we should know how to maneuver it to best suit our clients’ needs.

This post is not a tutorial, nor have I found decent websites for actual beginners like I was. I needed someone’s hand held up to my screen with the project I was currently doing, and then that person had to point out exactly what I was looking for in the code. Don’t get me wrong. I generally turn to tutorials over the Internet for whatever I need to learn. I just couldn’t find one on coding that was basic enough for me.

Now I’m hungry for more. What exactly can code give me? I’m going to go find out!