Write for CSS-Tricks!

Hey, glad you’re here! If you’re interested in writing an article to publish on CSS-Tricks, you’re in the right spot. We put this little page together to give you everything you need to get started.

Why you should apply to be a guest writer

1. It’s a win for our readers.
   They get to learn from your experience. Nobody knows exactly what you know.
2. It’s a win for you, the writer.
   We have a budget to pay you for your work. And the exposure you get ain’t bad.
3. It’s a win for CSS-Tricks.
   The more valuable content we publish, the more often people drop by to visit.

What to keep in mind when guest writing

1. Write the article you wish you found when you Googled for it. (Chris’ tweet)
2. Deliver a sensation of lived experience and professional acumen. (Frank Chimero) 

Would you be happy to land on this article from a search? Are you speaking to me, developer-to-developer, from experience?

What you should write about

The best advice is something Chris Coyier wrote a while back:

Write the article you wish you found when you googled something.

There’s a Frank Chimero quote that’s equally relevant:

Most design content has become poor quality, surface-level content marketing that does more damage than good, because it offers over-simplified, misinformed perspectives dressed up as guidance. One hardly gets the sensation of lived experience and professional acumen in the words.

So, the bottom line is that we’re looking for something that is referential and instructional, but also based on real-life experiences that connect with readers. It can’t be documentation that the reader can get somewhere else, nor can it be a tutorial using the same example — modal, to-do list, meme generator, etc. — that is already well-covered in other tutorials. It’s a specific situation of a learning discovery you made that resonates with readers personally and gives them something new to bookmark and use later.

Audience, tone, and length

It probably goes without saying that front-end web designers and developers are our main audience. What might be less obvious is that they are coming from different points in their careers. Some are seasoned veterans from the table layout era, others may be getting into HTML & CSS for the first, while the rest are somewhere in between.

Audience

The other thing to note is that “web design” and “web development” mean so many different things. One of the funny things we laugh about around here is that we’re called CSS-Tricks but tend to write about the larger field of front-end development. And that field is long and wide with many, many specializations. We cater to all of them, whether we’re talking about code, design systems, accessibility, performance, typography, copywriting, semantics… and so on.

Tone

We’re all friends around here! We like to keep the tone of our articles pretty chill. Some will be more technical than others. Some will be a little more opinionated than others. The best articles are those that explore ideas from multiple angles with an open mind that there’s usually more than one way to do something and the “best” way could depend on who is reading and what they’re working on.

You can generally assume readers have basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, except when covering those basics adds to the clarity of your article.

The tone should be:

• Comprehensive and written for all experience levels
• Technically detailed and correct
• Practical, useful, and self-contained
• Friendly but formal

So, the best advice is to be yourself and write like we’re all gathered around a campfire talking shop.

Length

We’re all about substance over quantity! The sweet spot for any article is somewhere in the range of 600-1,500 words. Articles can be short and sweet if they’re clear and useful. Similarly, articles can be longer if we’re dealing with a nitty-gritty topic with nuance and technical details.

But again, clarity is the goal.

Speaking of which, the following things are great to help improve the clarity of your article:

1. Relevant images and videos. Visual aides are strongly encouraged. Be sure that images have proper alt text and captions (if needed). No memes, please.
2. Blocks of code. They help demonstrate concepts. But focus on just the most relevant parts of the code rather than plopping an entire file on the page.
3. Demos. CodePen, if possible; other interactive code embeds, if needed. Demos are perfect for demonstrating a proof of concept or finished work.

Payments

We do indeed pay you for any of your work that we publish. You put in the work, after all!

We pay $250 USD for the vast majority of articles, which is paid either via PayPal or in the form of DigitalOcean credit. Please be sure that PayPal is supported in your country, otherwise we’ll go the DigitalOcean credit route.

Guest writing application

We ask everyone to fill out this form to guest post on CSS-Tricks, whether you have written for us before or are a new writer. We will never share your private information without your express permission.

You’ll be asked to attach a rough draft of your idea to give us a sense of your writing style and professional experience. It doesn’t have to be perfect. There will be an editing process to clean things up. And if you don’t have the time to write a draft, you’re welcome to submit a brief outline of the key points instead — but you will write a draft at some point in the process if your application is accepted. 😉

One final note: We review applications weekly and we get a lot of them. Every application is looked at and, even though we try our best to follow up on all of them, we prioritize responding to accepted applications.