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 guys made some money, it's not bad idea, specially knowing nobody cares now tutorials on internet with the era of agentic development. See StackOverflow, it's dead. They did the right thing when selling this.
>"I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development."
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.
Llms are not good at web design or writing css, this art form will live on for a long time to come. It is art, I dont care what people say, and as we all know machines mostly suck at creating art. Anthropic claims to have started training in "taste", but im sure they've realized that cannot be distilled into vector embeddings. Taste is somewhat empheral and is dictated by society and culture that machines can't experience.
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.
I see your point and I agree that ultimately web design will be incredibly hard to automate, probably harder than almost any other programming domain, where people will likely stay for accountability reasons.
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.
AI model taste is not good, but taste is easy and many cheap human have soul, only hard part is memorize CSS trivia, I predict cost of UI/UX go down and CSS education business also go down
I shared your sentiment maybe a year+ ago when it comes to css, and I do think it's one of the areas AI in general struggles with (where art and code meet), but it's a lot better today with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models as someone that works on design systems for a living (for now). It follows stylistic patterns, it can inspect the issue in the browser and have a better understanding of CSS upstream effects than it used to (it used to suck at this and paint itself into a corner over and over like some game of whack-a-mole), and can even tackle things using latest interop features.
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."
I run a similar-in-spirit site about starting from scratch on a project and getting to something functional. I tried both ads and courses, in my case neither were very successful. The most success I had was in offering to do the things the site tells you how to do in exchange for money. That's been my full time job for the last 6 years. I don't know if that's workable in the UI/UX world.
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.
Not sure how it holds up in this day and age but a common setup was to have 3 products: free, cheap, expensive.
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.
Did DigitalOcean forget they owned CSS-Tricks? Because that's what seemed to have happened based on the limited notes on the subject I've read in the past few weeks.
They got occupied by donating millions to slop AI linux and leeching off of open source with no contributions.
Theres a single solo developer who donated 40k this year to postgres, their name is next to AWS on contributors. Digital ocean sells scam postgres services for newbs and has never contributed a dime (afaik).
Complete slop overpriced cloud platform now too thats leaned way to hard into AI nobody goes to them for.
It's a bold move. Educational material -- particularly frontend -- is an ever-shrinking pie, so Geoff is betting on claiming a very large share of that. I hope it pays off.
I remember learning the very basics of webdev from CSS Tricks. Years and years ago. They've been with me for my entire career and I am happy to see them independent again.
Good luck, I guess, but in 2026 "CSS Tricks" seems about as relevant as "PostScript Tricks" or "Office Open XML Tricks". Human manipulation of CSS is going to be, at best, a hobby for a few dedicated tinkerers. And I say that as someone who invested a significant amount of the last 20 years getting good at CSS.
learning css is going to go the way of learning jquery. at this stage with AI, having a fundamental grasp on css is about all you need. with the stuff that claude and company can produce, do anyone really code css by hand anymore?
I am pessimistic. I hope I am wrong. In the age of AI, content websites are trying to find a new identity for themselves. CSS-Tricks are great resources for the tinkerer and imagineer. What kind of products and services can be offered to this niche? courses? ads? donation buttons? Nope. Innovation, maybe. Paywalled css tools like color palette, or smartArt type demos. The problem is that these tools require a dedicated staff just for billing, user support, and maintenance. Say 10% of the revenue goes towards the existing CSS tricks team. That is $20 million dollars worth of annual revenue needed. $10 per user. 2 million users. If they are lucky I expect them to get 300k users. That makes it $60 per user.
There is either going to be a layoff, a price increase, or I don't know.
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?
(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.
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.
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.
Theres a single solo developer who donated 40k this year to postgres, their name is next to AWS on contributors. Digital ocean sells scam postgres services for newbs and has never contributed a dime (afaik).
Complete slop overpriced cloud platform now too thats leaned way to hard into AI nobody goes to them for.
"You urkel, yet? I've no idea why I waited so long ..."
"Duuuude just urkel and boost your professional/career visibility"
Best of luck to Graham. I've got no idea how they'll make CSS-Tricks work as an indy blog in this era, but I hope they do make it work.
Ads, affil, ebooks, membership, voluntary payments (Wikipedia’s fundraising header can be used as template)… Implement everything and don’t be shy.
CSS tricks was never about only css, it also had js, html, design and other tips, too.
Pretty useful to catch up with webdev related new features
There is either going to be a layoff, a price increase, or I don't know.