This post is part of our question & answer series, and this question comes from Ranjeet :
I am planning to start an educational guidance blog. And for that we have started to gather all information. What I want to know is; do I need to have good programming skills to start blogging? Since I am not good in programming will it be necessary for me to start learning? If yes, from what should I start and which languages should I learn. Hope you will take a little time to answer my question. Thank you.
Thanks to Ranjeet for his question. Â This is a good question for us to address here, because it is a question that is on the mind of many new bloggers. Â So — in this article I will answer Ranjeet’s excellent question by laying out all of the information you need to know about programming languages (coding) as they relate to blogging.
Some of the questions we will address are:
- Do you need to learn coding for blogging?
- Which programming language is important for bloggers?
- Can you blog without any programming skills?
Blogging – Programming – Coding : To Be or Not to Be
First of all, if you are someone who wishes to have a blog and yet you have no knowledge of any programming language, do not worry!
You can blog without any programming skills at all.
That said, having any new skill is always an advantage, and is helpful in various ways. If you know any programming language at all, (HTML, CSS, PHP), it will be helpful to you in your online work, but if not, don’t despair!
One of the best things about blogging is that anyone without any technical skills at all can start and maintain a blog. There are many self-help guides and tutorials on the web which can help you to start and run your blog. For example: How to Install your First WordPress Blog.
Many people equate blogging with web design, and thus they think web design skills are a prerequisite to managing a blog.  This is not true.
In order to start and maintain a blog, you need to have knowledge of the topic(s) you’ll be writing about, and have good writing skills to present that knowledge. Â The rest can be dealt with quite easily.
With that said, there are some programming languages which are useful in advanced blogging, especially if you have a technical blog.
In case if you are like me and you do not know these programming languages, I have a solution for this which I will propose at the conclusion of this article.
Which programming languages are useful for blogging?
HTML/ HTML5 :
HTML is the first and most basic language I can recommend. Though most blogging platforms like WordPress and BlogSpot offer WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, knowing HTML coding is always going to be handy. There may come a time when you will face issues with post breaking and formatting. Having HTML knowledge will be helpful in situations such as these. Additionally, when you want to place ads in your blog widgets or in the theme code, knowing basic HTML codes will make your work easier.
Still, HTML is the easiest language to learn, and within two or three hours’ time you can be someone who can talk, eat and walk HTML.
Note that if you have not already started to learn basic HTML, I would suggest learning HTML5 instead.
PHP:
If you are a WordPress blogger, knowing PHP will be like having a magic wand. You can quickly fix many issues related to WordPress, and you can code your own plugin or theme.
PHP is a server-side scripting language which can be very helpful to your web development and to the enhancement of the capabilities of your WordPress blog.
If you are in college or are simply in the mood to learn a new language, PHP can certainly be helpful to your blogging career.
Moreover, if you are a good PHP coder, you can make money by creating and selling WordPress plugins.
CSS/ CSS3:Â
Knowing CSS will help you to be able to quickly edit your blog theme. You can make minor changes like colors, padding and a few others to improve your blog. Particularly for WordPress themes, knowing CSS and PHP will help you to keep improving your blog day after day. CSS is a language which I wish to learn, followed by CSS3 .
A few additional notes of interest:
Javascript is another language which you can consider learning, as it can help you to beautify your websites with jQuery.
There are other skills which are not related to programming, but are useful to you as a blogger such as video editing and image editing. For video editing, you can learn any professional video editing software, and for image editing Photoshop is the best.
Apart from learning these types of skills, you may also wish to take a photography course. Knowledge of photography and the ability to take excellent photos is going to be very useful to any blogger in the long-run, and this type of excellence will make you stand out from the rest of the blogging crowd.
Do you know that it takes only 20 hours to acquire a new skills?
If you are looking for a single recommendation, I would suggest starting with Treehouse.
If you looking for a completely free solution, W3School is the best place to start learning to code.
Once again, if you are a person who possesses no coding skills whatsoever, not to worry! You can get along just fine with what is currently available to you, and you can add to your skills as time allows. You can also hire people from sites like oDesk and Freelancer.com to get certain types of work done for you, and you can focus on what you do best.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask me via the comments section.
If you find this post useful, please feel free to share it with your network on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
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HTML is very necessary for every blogger though its not a programming language, it’s a Markup language or used it to design not execute something.
HI HARSH, thanks for your post, this gave me a lot of ideas about which coding i need to learn for blogging. as I am new in blogging platform I learned from ground searching about coding now i can able to find, edit and save my blog in Blogspot. i want to learn above programmes. please give me a link where i can learn these coding easily & free.
Hi harsh !! Coding knowledge is so important for a blogger , Because A blogger face a lot issues during their blogging career and if he know how to edit than he doesn’t need to hire a designer 🙂 Btw very use full post !!!
Hello Harsh, It’s for newbie bloggers and may help them a lot. If they read all comments about who gives a better platform to build their blog, then they can get an idea. My suggestion is to go for HTLM & CSS to build a blog.
Thanks for sharing Good Informative Article
HTML is the main part of blogging. So it depends upon you can implement this practice in practical. There are a number of institutes who are providing different programming languages and anyone can learn programming languages from those institutes. Thanks !!!
Javascript is must know if you are managing your blog by yourself. As it is client side scripting so any customization which can be possible through javascript we should use it because by this way we will not put extra load on server which can happen if we use server side script
Firstly, I’ll have to show sincere appreciation to Rajeent, who in the first place asked this question which mot bloggers carries about everyday and couldn’t find a specific answer to. Understanding HTML basic language is a bit advisable to all blogger who want t manage and handle things on their own include PHP.
Great article!! Initailly i though there is no programming knowledge needed for wordpress blogging and you can get everything with plugins! I know lilttle php but HTML and CSS has always been a necessity to tweak the plugin and posts!!
PHP and CSS is very much useful for bloggers for improving their websites.
Hi harsh, thank you for being kind to write a article about my question. It was very helpful post it has almost everything i needed. And just today i read a post on this site about how to comment on blogs, and i will suggest everyone to go through it. I am saying this because here on the same article i can see very valuable comments. thank you.
Dear Harsh thank you so much for this extremely helpful article, in fact I am also intending to start my own blog on Textile and Fashion Design and this was the first question in my mind about programming languages … regards Subeer
Add javascript to the list it is also powerful language can make many differences in website.
Though you have covered every thing but there is one mistake, HTML is not a scripting language. You can’t define logic using HTML for that either you need to use JS for client side or PHP (one can use other languages as well) for server side.
All these languages are must.But i think sometime there is also some use of java script in there.
i think you miss JavaScript , many time we required it with wordpress
Basic knowledge of JavaScript is useful for bloggers. So I think all programming languages are helpful, Thanks for sharing Such informative article.
As Harsh said it takes only twenty minutes to learn a new skill , therefore I would recommend every newcomer to learn at least two programming languages i.e HTML5 and CSS3. This will not only save you a lot of money in your pocket but also time because you don’t need to contact your web developer to do small customization on your website for you. If you are a WordPress blogger then do try to learn PHP too because you can easily make a lot of money by creating your own custom themes and plugins.
Hey Harsh, I would add some MySQL too.
HTML isn’t a programming language it is ‘Markup Language’
Hi Harsh, Why you have not included JavaScript in this list ?. It’s extremely helpful when some interaction to be added in blogs, example like your sticky floating bar.