Why Coding Is Essential to Grow Your Business
Better customization, better ranking on SERPs, better security, and more…
If you’re an entrepreneur trying to establish a new business, you must know that the journey of growing your company will not be a piece of cake.
As your business starts to take off, you should expect that you will encounter setbacks along the way — many of them.
That is why it is vitally important that you know how to deal with snags, no matter how minor they may be.
As we live in an era where people spend most of their time clicking and scrolling through their mobile devices, utilizing digital channels would play a very crucial role in growing your business.
Recent studies show that roughly 4 billion people use social media nowadays. On average, these users spend about 144 minutes on social networking sites every single day.
With this many potential consumers saturating the internet, you must be smart enough in promoting your brand across digital platforms.
Having a strong background in sales or a unique and creative mind for advertising may be considered the most fundamental skills every entrepreneur must have to thrive in the market, but having other relevant skills like coding, right in your arsenal, can also make you one step ahead of the game.
In this article, we’re going to talk about the benefits of coding in growing your business, and why it is a must-have skill for every business owner today.
Building and Maintaining Marketing Tools
Building a website is an important step in growing your business.
This is where people can reach you, and get the products and services you offer, making it one of the most effective marketing tools your business can utilize aside from social media.
First, let us discuss how coding works to your advantage in this regard.
Let’s say you’re a business owner with little-to-no knowledge of building your own website from scratch, and you’re choosing between 1) utilizing common website builders or 2) learning how to code your own website.
Which one should you go for? Let’s compare and analyze.
Better Customization
Standing out as a brand is very crucial. That’s why you should make sure that you instill a distinct feel to your audiences whenever they go and visit your website.
But with thousands of brands competing against you, how can you stand out?
Website builders like Wix and Godaddy offer customizable themes and personalization tools that users can choose from.
This allows users to save time and effort in creating their website.
But with the multitude of users utilizing these “existing” features, it is more likely that your web page can end up looking like someone else’s. Hand-coding
your own website may take a lot of work, but it will surely give you the freedom of designing your page unlike any other.
Better SEO Ranking
SEO ranking refers to your website’s spot on the search engine results page.
Aside from your website’s relevance to the words entered by users in the search bar, the number of backlinks your website contains greatly affects your position in the ranking.
A site created through website builders often contains unnecessary backlinks, making it slower to load.
This would affect your ranking in search engine results, as Google gives higher SEO priority to faster loading sites.
If you hand-code your own website, you may not have to worry about removing unwanted backlinks as you may choose to create one with less code.
Better Security
Website builders utilize Content Management Systems (CMS) in storing data within their websites.
At the same time, these CMS platforms use the same security codes across each website, making them easy targets for hackers. And we don’t want that!
Creating your own security code could be the most effective way to prevent this from happening.
Remember, being targeted for cyber crimes like data mining, can cause grave damage to your business, making investors and customers lose trust in your brand.
More often than not, this kind of pitfall is difficult to overcome.
If you’re going to weigh up the benefits of using CMS platforms as compared to coding your own website, it is evident that coding makes a better choice.
Yes, it strips away convenience.
since you have to build everything from scratch, but its benefits definitely make up for its downsides.
A Value-Added Resource
Maintaining business operations while dealing with technical glitches can be very challenging, especially for startups and small businesses, which usually have scarce manpower to even form an IT team to handle such issues.
Mastering the coding language may be far from what your business is all about, but the skill itself is a good investment to your company as it is used in a lot of aspects in executing various business functions.
Coding also goes beyond creating websites and securing data.
This skill is explicitly used in data science and analytics, providing businesses with trends and relevant insights crucial in determining what strategies to use in growing their businesses.
“I’m interested, but isn’t coding hard to learn?”
There’s no rule stating that coding is just for the savvies!
Just like baking, drawing, or playing the guitar, it is a skill any person can learn.
Most people think that coding takes years to master, but generally, it only takes about 3–12 months depending on your pace.
With a plethora of resources within everyone’s reach such as books, video tutorials, and online courses (free or paid), dedication and perseverance are the only requirements you as a business owner will need to start your coding journey.
One common coding language used by pros and beginners is Python. Considered as the easiest coding language to learn, this programming software requires fewer lines of code — allowing first-time coders to write and create relatively fast.
Final Thoughts
Technology shapes how the business industry works today. Especially now, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced businesses all over the world to temporarily shut their doors, the impact of
These innovations are felt more than ever. With that being said, business owners need to take advantage of skills like coding, to have the upper hand in this ever-advancing industry.
Author: Chatty is a freelance writer from Manila. She finds joy in inspiring and educating others through writing. That’s why aside from her job as a language evaluator for local and international students, she spends her leisure time writing about various topics such as lifestyle, technology, and business.
