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Guest Writing

Improve your development and writing skills by contributing content to the site.

This site is all about helping developers build better websites through tips, tricks, tutorials, and more. You can become an open-source contributor by writing content for the site.

note

If you're looking to add content to the site that promotes a product or brand, please begin by reading the sponsorship page.

Level Up Your Skills by Teaching

Writing anywhere is great for these reasons:

  • The fastest way to learn is to teach. Writing a guide on some particular topic forces the author to truly understand the topic.
  • The best way to get better at writing is to write. Writing is an essential form of communication in a remote, asynchronous world.
  • Writing forces writers to be a bit vulnerable. To open themselves up to criticism, to confront a lack of knowledge or understanding in some area. It's a great strengthening and growing exercise.

Whatever your topic and platform of choice, I encourage you to put your writing somewhere, even if it's not on this site.

Writing for this Site

Writing for this site provides additional benefits:

  • Professional editing: Sean is a professional technical writer and developer who will work directly with you to build a publishable piece with your name on it.
  • Widen your influence: Adding another site on which you've been published helps spread your influence a bit farther. By publishing here, you can add to your audience and increase SEO for your other content.
  • No maintenance: You can publish and then walk away. No need to maintain the site or the content.
  • Established cadence: When you write in your own space, you're the only one who can maintain the frequency of content that readers expect. Here you're part of a site that is publishing other pieces to keep readers coming back.

Writing Process

Here's how the process works:

  1. Pitch: To get started, send an email to Sean with a brief summary of what you'd like to contribute. Include details like the audience, difficulty, and goals for the piece. See below for types of content that is accepted. Note: There's a long backlog of ideas, too. You're welcome to ask for a few topics to get started.
  2. Outline (recommended): Though optional, after choosing a topic, you may submit an outline for review. This is a great way to ensure your piece is focused before spending time writing. Continue to communicate via email, but use a platform suitable for collaboration for your outline, such as Notion, Dropbox Paper, or Google Docs. (We prefer Notion.)
  3. Draft: Using the same platform as with your outline, submit a draft via email.
  4. Review: Sean will review and leave comments. It may take several iterations to get it right. You may open a reviewed document and see comments all over the place. This is good — it means your piece is going to come out better. But it may take some work to improve. But they are just suggestions and this is your piece. You can always choose to not accept the suggestion.
  5. Publish: When your piece is in good shape, Sean will prep and schedule it for publishing. Before publishing, you'll want to provide some profile details.

Profile Details

When you are added as a contributor, you get your own card on the contributors page, along with your own page, (here's an example).

Provide the following details about yourself:

  • Full name
  • Twitter handle
  • Headshot/avatar
  • Short bio

You can submit these via email during the review process.

Type of Content

This site is broad in its mission: To help developers build better websites, while remembering to have a bit of fun along the way.

Today, most of the content is geared toward front-end developers, often those who know some JavaScript. But that has evolved over the years. There are plenty of posts on CSS and HTML.

Here are a few posts published on the site to give you an idea of what a good piece is and the variety of content that you can write:

From this list above, notice that articles can be written in many different ways:

  • Tutorials / guides
  • Quick tips
  • Thought pieces
  • Listicles

Articles must bring something unique. If I can google the title to your proposed article and see useful results, it's probably not the right article to be spending your time on.

Payment

At this time, there is no payment for publishing content on this site. The project is purely for the good of the community and does not make any money. Should this site begin to earn money at some point in the future, contributors will be paid.