I've done only a small amount of web-design work over the years, but I can imagine that, if I landed on CSS-tricks trying to work out a tricky (to me) CSS or usability problem where LLMs had been failing me, and I had a quick and easy option to pay a few hundred dollars and meet with the guy who wrote the book, I might do that. That's also how I got a lot of my first customers in my current business; I offered paid phone calls where a user could pay a nominal rate and ask some upfront questions about a project they were working on. Many of those calls turned in to longer contracts, and the fee kept out the folks who were just looking to sell me something.
A lot of my customers have been organizations whose focus is not my industry, but, for one reason or another, they needed something done that fits in my wheelhouse. This means they don't (yet) want to hire this expertise and build processes internally, so they're willing to pay my premium rates. Perhaps there is a way to target these types of companies with custom services in the space.
The free one gets people in the door. Cheap is could be something like a book or paid tool or course. And the "expensive" would usually be consulting but could also be a more premium tool or retainer service.
So your suggestion seems to fit the model.
I know LLMs will change the developer education landscape but I really hope it doesn't kill it. Interesting times.
It might be interesting to have a list/map of WISPs on your site!
While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately, I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development.
Don't get me wrong, I think CSS-Tricks is a great resource and it has helped me over the years, but if I was in Geoff's shoes right now I'd be pretty scared.
Look at TailwindCSS for example, they had to reduce the size of their team and ended up joining Shopify to continue surviving. It is hard out here these days.
I don't want to sound too doom and gloom, so I wish Geoff the best of luck and I hope he succeeds.
Scared of what, exactly? It looks to me like the site is primarily static content, so operational costs should be reasonable. He could scale down to just static content, and even if traffic decrease, it is not an existential crisis. Or am I missing something?
The blogpost literally says he's making this his full time job. What's reasonable is to ask how that will pan out. And to, after answering oneself, tell the relevant party to be weary of it.
> High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers.
You're right, but the high-value audiences are also looking at the sources the LLMs cite, guiding the LLMs to use specific source and exclude others (even if it's just "eschew blogspam and listicles" in the prompt). So being one of those sources is still valuable. Perhaps less so, but it's not without value.
What you're doing is hard work, but it's way more straightforward than building out CSS Tricks.
You're a successful marathon runner. CSS Tricks will have to run a marathon with both legs tied together.
What makes your subject matter (LLMs) work is that it's a very fast moving topic, much faster moving than CSS, so people come to you for news.
Plus, it's difficult to test new models effectively, so people are looking for trusted names to do meta analysis, fast. Is the new OpenAI model better than Claude? Better how? Quality of output? Evaluated how? Even comparing prices can be difficult, as different models (at different settings) can generate different numbers of tokens (and different numbers of cached tokens) for the same tasks.
None of that applies to CSS Tricks.
CSS fundamentally can't move that fast, as long as changes in CSS require Apple, Google, and Mozilla to all agree on standards. Hardly anybody needs to know about the latest CSS news. Mostly you only need to know about Baseline Widely Available CSS features, which are at least 30 months old by definition. And when you do learn about new CSS features, it's usually pretty obvious (either to you or to an LLM) whether those new CSS features apply to something you're working on.
It's going to be very, very hard to keep CSS Tricks alive, even with a lot of hard work.
In future LLMs will make buying decisions and this strategy can become viable again.
- publishing is fucking hard. Early on, you need a constant stream of dependable writers who do not value their time. Later on, you have a constant stream of writers but have to figure out who will make you hate your life the least.
- good writers are flaky and they always have options. A little less than half of good pitches get published. 100% of good pitches take work.
- there is a difference between good and dependable writers. Early on, you need dependable even though each one eats a lot of time. Layer on, you need good. You won’t know when to switch until your readers tell you that you suck. Then it’s too late to save your publication.
- I published before generative AI was possible but at each stage of popularity, I dealt with more PR shit bags. Add in generative AI and I’m not sure my naïveté would have survived as long as it did.
- at its best, publishing is a very expensive way to harm yourself. Back in the day, Jim Rose would have paid me to fuck myself up in equivalent ways. Naïveté convinces you that you’re changing the world through self flagellation, but when that’s gone you’re just beating the shit out of yourself.
- my co-founder handled editorial and I handled publishing. The gap between them is so massive that we really needed double the headcount. Alas, publishing is totally fucked so our budget was so low that we needed slave labour yet couldn’t even afford the slave in the first place. Without the editorial/publication divide, I would have had a heart attack five years before I did.
- there’s this thing in publishing called the trough of zero ideas. You won’t believe it’s possible in the beginning but it will hit you hard. It’s not so much there aren’t ideas; it’s that you’re tired and ideas stop feeling good… they feel like work because they are.
- in publishing it’s really easy to come up with business models. Unfortunately, every single business model requires consistently exceptional content, a reality distortion field and a lot of hand holding.
- all those membership plans etc will be invaded by sales or PR fucks as soon as you launch them. $25 a month makes a lot of people feel entitled to explain your dreams to you.
Edit - This sounds very negative and it is… but I want to publish again.
That "basically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I don't even use Tailwind and I know the point is to localize basic style information and reduce the amount of weird CSS you have to write via functions and utilities.
Especially because Tailwind came well before CSS started natively having these features (let alone them becoming baseline widely available).
Both of those goals definitely help the current era of agents by making it easier to find the rules that affect an element without needing to reliably search all of the project CSS, and reducing required context use and the need to keep track of selector lists.
A very large percentage of the Tailwind classes also seem to be more or less 1:1 with CSS, or like 1:2.. So it's the locality and brevity IMHO that contributes most to reducing cognitive load.. Or at least in making it faster..
LLMs get along well with high locality..
I'm not sure if I'm disagreeing or agreeing with you now LOL.
using the word "ultimately" makes this "Monday night quarterbacking"
It's not a mistake to plan a picnic for a day that turns out to be rainy, even if you got paid to plan the picnic.
It would be a mistake to sell if the seller should have known at the time of the sale that the seller's goals would not be met, but something turning out badly doesn't retroactively make it having been a mistake, it just means it came out badly.
(EDIT: oh maybe you're saying the same thing and I misunderstood?)
I owe Coyier and CSS Tricks a huge debt to getting my career started in the 2000s. It's loss will be tragic. But web development (as we knew it) has gone the way of elevator operators. Dead and gone. Good on the guys for getting their bag while it still had some value.
In fact, I think it will have more staying power than most, if not all of web dev domains of expertise.
Theres simply no "soul" behind llm crafted websites. There are companies out there, like lovable et al who sell the idea that web design is solved but are still hiring six figure retainer design firms to do their frontend.
I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten.
But the thing is that for the vast majority of web pages/applications, it barely matters what does the design look like, especially for B2B/internal apps. All the dashboards, CRMs, tracking tools, etc -- these exist mostly for functional requirements, so the design just needs to be inoffensive.
B2C market might hold longer, but ultimately there might emerge some sort of higher-level design specification language which would sidestep the original problem or being too recognizable.
I don't want to ruin your day, but LLMs excel at CSS, thanks to the abundance of explainer articles like those on css–tricks.com. Had a bug fixed in about 10s the other week after having stared at it myself for like 10min.
It does make really silly mistakes now and then, like using fallback css variables in the wrong order, but they are fewer and farther in between.
"I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten."
Agreed!
Then hand it to the LLM and it'll make CSS to match.
Nothing a frontier LLM has built me in the last year has been satisfactory to me. Every detail was shipped after millions of tokens stripping back and optimizing what Fable/Opus started doing.
The process is leaner and faster, but frontend isn’t “solved” just because LLMs exist.
I'm glad it's back with someone who loves the craft, cares, can dedicate the time to it, and not just own it to slap a "Powered by" logo on the front page. At least there's that.
Edit: Worth reading Coyier's take some some time back in 2024 to refresh. https://chriscoyier.net/2024/02/28/where-im-at-on-the-whole-...
Sounds like DigitalOcean really convinced Coyier that they'd invest and focus on CSS tricks as a key funnel, and I'm so curious why that ball was entirely dropped.
In my personal experience, so many decisions like this come down to one person with a suit and tie at the top making a decision, then either leaving or completely forgetting about it. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened here. For me and so many others, it's just hard to see something that had so much momentum and promise completely neglected for no clear reason.
Hoping the best for this new iteration of CSS Tricks, especially in this time where so many are struggling to find that interest in learning the basics of technologies when AI can do it for you.
My paycheck for the better part of a decade came from publications run by a large tech company in an arrangement not too dissimilar from DO's relationship with CSS-Tricks. It was great while it lasted, but shortly after I left it was the first thing on the chopping block when the layoffs started. That was 3-4 years ago and the landscape for quality tech publishing hasn't gotten any easier.
Just goes to show that you can always make the world a better place with a little bit of luck and a lot of well placed effort. Kudos also to the pressure people put on Digital Ocean to do right by CSS Tricks and kudos to DO for allowing Geoff to take the site independent after their priorities changed.
But seriously, good luck to them. I used to make Photoshop tutorials before YouTube, and it was a lot of fun. When YouTube came around, all the eyeballs went there, rightfully so -- videos made more sense for Photoshop. But I didn't have it in me to pivot.
And these days you don't even have to know how to do things like mask objects. There's one-click solutions, there's generative fill, light matching, face filters, etc. Hell, you can rotate a 2d layer in 3d now. Soon, live prompting in Photoshop will be the norm.
Chris acknowledged credit in the comments but never updated the "I saw it maybe a year ago but I can’t for the life of me remember where." after I pointed out that he had seen and commented on my Codepen* of this trick.