[shubhamjain]

I think CSS-Tricks was a big blunder on DigitalOcean's side. That explains why they pulled the plug on all their resources. They believed they could get sizeable traffic towards DigitalOcean and their products, but soon they realized (or some marketing/strategy person in the company proved it) that the audience that cares about CSS and front-end won't likely be buying their products. Because if it was giving them the ROI, I see no reason why they would cut off all the resources. Their tutorials work because most of them are related to server administration that directly brings programmers who might be interested in DO's products.

Chris's proposal was a wild shot, but I do think the best way to move forward is to write-off the acquisition and either give it away or sell it. Otherwise, the site risks dying out slowly.

[quickthrower2]

The money in CSS is selling $500 courses with the same content as the free ones (because everyone is selling to beginners which is where the $ is), but with a great designer can make it look really sexy.

[red_admiral]

To be fair though, CSS is one of the things where a great designer who can make things look sexy might be worth that $500 to learn from. After all, your site looking better can translate to a lot of extra user engagement and money.

[notatoad]

Teaching css and teaching design aren’t the same thing though. And the beginner css courses are mostly not teaching design.

[red_admiral]

I'm sure you're right, but I wish the two were taught together more - the "how" (CSS syntax) and "why" (design principles) should really be approached together, with a bit of talking about accessibility thrown in.

[mrexroad]

Forget CSS and design principles, I’d be happy if folks just had a basic grasp of information hierarchy / content architecture and relevant semantic elements.

[satvikpendem]

I don't know, I've done Josh W Comeau's CSS for JS Developers [0] and it was a very good course, teaching CSS from the ground up such that I save much more time now debugging CSS issues. However, I didn't pay for it, my company did (which is why the pricing is so expensive, it's to use up corporate education budgets).

[0] https://css-for-js.dev/

[agmater]

Why did they not just advertise on the site instead? This current approach seems like the worst possible decision. Fair enough that they want ROI, but abandoning it isn't going to get you there. At least put a writer on it? At the time the PR speak [1] was "community" and "reach" but now they've not only wasted their money but are actively turning developers against them.

> “CSS-Tricks will broaden and complement our existing library of content, furthering DigitalOcean’s reach with both frontend and full-stack developers, and supports our community strategy, a key differentiator for DigitalOcean in the cloud computing space,” DigitalOcean CEO Yancey Spruill said.

[1]: https://wptavern.com/digitalocean-acquires-css-tricks

[pier25]

Digital Ocean invested in their apps product with static sites etc hoping to attract front end users from Vercel and Netlify. But their product was bad and no amount of advertising could change that.