One of the key things that were taught in the World Internet Summit – and agreed upon by many speakers, is that Internet Marketers must focus on the marketing aspect of the website and leave the technical details to the techies.
While I find that proposition true, how true is this statement – “Internet Marketers do not need to know HTML”?
HTML is the language of the web! It is the core language behind everything that you see behind every single webpage, every single blog, and everything!
I’m not saying that Internet Marketers must know about AJAX or Web 2.0 or CSS or stuff like that, but my personal feel is that it would be best to get started with the basics of HTML, at least, the simplest tags like <p>, <a href… and stuff like that.
Of course, I must admit that I have seen marketers that manage to make it really big, not knowing HTML at all, but I’m sure what goes on behind the scene is that there is a technical person helping out with the marketer himself. It is important to know that this is not the case for many newbie Internet marketers – most of us start with absolutely no knowledge of computers!
So, my advice for starters – please get yourself some basic knowledge on HTML, or team up with someone competent in it. It is great that complex software today can help you do things in the “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) manner, but after being in the computing line for at least 8 years, what I can say is that the software does not do everything. There are some little tweaks you must get down to the code to do. You don’t have to be able to whip out a HTML page from scratch, but at least, you must be able to know where to delete an annoying extra line which just doesn’t go off in your WYSIWYG editor.
Blogging Post Boxes
While most blogging platforms do have a visual text editor, I find that the editors are still not as stable as they might be. Remember that ultimately, the Googlebot reads the HTML code, not only what you see in the visual editor… so to have full control, it is still better to use to traditional post box – and this is exactly what I do in blogging.
Then again, maybe its just me. 
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I think I am at a serious advantage because I am a web designer who is very comfortable with HTML. It would be very difficult to do any internet marketing without some basic HTML knowledge. The good news is that if you can use a Word Processor, then you can learn basic HTML – it’s just not that hard.
Thanks Char. Exactly – during the World Internet Summit they were demonstrating how to set a basic page with Frontpage, and true enough, with the right tools, you don’t need to know A LOT of HTML since its practically like a Word Processor. However, I thinking the fundamentals of knowing how things work on the web would benefit and make things much easier.
With this thing going round about making money without the technical knowledge, I am really seeing more ugly looking sites around.. hhaha
I’ve been learning for around 5-6 years now about web design and web development, any level of opening a website takes knowledge of html, I tried opening TyperTappers without doing any coding at all and this was very annoying (hope you have a bbcode plugin).
WYSIWYG editors are the worst though thinking about Dreamweaver here (all I’ve used) setting up a CSS layout can be very annoying from what I recall from someone saying on a forum is that old browsers do not support position:absolute;(correct me if I’m wrong) but setting up a CSS layout in Dreamweaver contains alot of absolute positioning.
So i can’t see them being very useful, and no one wants a site using tables anymore do they as it has so many downfalls.
On the learning side of it, if you’ve never coded anything in your life and you don’t have a hell of along time to learn then DO NOT LEARN IT, and pay me *cough* I mean a website developer to do what you need :D.
Heh! I realise I’ve got a team of web developers in my list of feeds 😛 Anyway, yeah I’ve been messing around with HTML ever since the times of Geocities and all the animated gif and stuff, now I’m still using Dreamweaver, but that is useful only to get a fast start for the layout.
Eventually, I still head right to the code for the final edits!
Anyway, I also feel that there is a potential issue with developing with WYSIWYG editors. The issue is that… sometimes WYS is NOT WYG! Haha!
I’ve come across several encounters and I’m sure experienced web designers can relate to this – that Dreamweaver shows something, Firefox shows another version, and then IE shows yet another version! So much for WYSIWSYG!
Yeah lol, thats the main reason why i don’t use it because as you said “WYS is not WYG” as for the firefox and IE thing in IE7 their actually starting to clean up their mess and following W3C rules because that is a massive reason why their becoming so unpopular.
But the problem is that alot of people are still using IE6 which doesn’t follow W3C so this is why i don’t use WYSIWYG editors, all my work is done in notepad or kate for linux.
As for the faster start for layouts when i experimented with it, it took me way too long to get a nice layout going, even then i needed to go into code view so many times because it was completely messing up.
The only thing Dreamweaver is good for is the templates if your new and the code view :D.
Yeah, well hey, I love Dreamweaver for its help in finding and renaming files – like when you change a filename – that’s probably why I’m sticking to it so much.
just chanced upon your blog today while googling “online marketing singapore” good SEO job there, looks like u are one blog marketer who really eat your own dog food..:D i am singaporean too and its always a nice surprise to find pple like you who’s into online mktg too. will be reading your blog more often from now.
Thanks bjorn! Yeah its great to meet fellow Singaporeans on my blog, because then I talk in Singlish! Muahaha 🙂
Great work there – PR5! 😛