Guest Writing for CSS-Tricks

Interested in guest writing for CSS-Tricks? We love guest writers around here! It’s always a win-win-win.

1. It’s a win for our readers, as 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 for guest writing of $300 for most articles, payable via PayPal or DigitalOcean credit. Complex production-focused topics may be paid out up to $400.
3. It’s a win for our website. We exist on content that people who make websites want to read.

Table of Contents

• What to keep in mind when guest writing
• What you should write about
• Audience, tone, and length
• Submit your proposal

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

We’re looking for technical, referential, and instructional content, and veering away from editorial. Think “How to X” by default, in the realm of building websites. We also skew toward the front end, so the technologies around HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as the widening circle of front-end concerns like site builders and frameworks

We prefer if you are motivated because you have something you very much want to share. And, that you have a deep knowledge on this topic. You are excited about it. You’re ready to tell people about it on CSS-Tricks. That’s what makes for good guest writing on CSS-Tricks.

Audience, tone, and length

The audience of CSS-Tricks is front-end web designers and developers at all different points in their professional journeys. We’re not going to tell you to target your articles at some arbitrary skill level like “beginner” or “advanced” — what you should target is clarity. Everyone appreciates an article written that makes technology understandable. You can generally assume 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

The loose goal for length is 600 words. An article can be shorter if it’s extremely useful and clear. Or an article can be a huge guide covering tons of details on a technology.

Always good:

1. A healthy amount of relevant images/videos. Images have proper alt text and may have captions. Images may not be meme/joke pics or pictures of code.
2. Blocks of code that get right to the most important concepts.
3. Demos. CodePen, if possible; other interactive code embeds, if needed.

Submit your proposal

You’ll need to write the article to the best of your ability upfront to provide a sense of your writing style, concept, and professional acumen. It doesn’t have to be perfect. There will be an editing process that happens after that.

If you don’t have the time to write an article that may not be published on CSS-Tricks, we totally understand, but we can’t commit to publishing anything without seeing a complete draft. If you’d like to send in a shorter pitch instead, to get a signal on if the idea is worth pursuing, that’s fine, but no publishing decision will be made until a complete draft is in.

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 expressed permission. Thank you in advance for taking the time.