Chris Coyier did not set out to build a publication. He set out to make beer money.

In 2007 he was working in digital prepress, at jobs he later described as ones he did not hate but did not love, and building websites in his spare time. With a friend, Jeff Penman, who worked for a company Adobe outsourced phone support to, he spun up a small network of self help sites aimed at people searching for answers about Adobe software. Names like photoshop-help.com and illustrator-help.com, five or six of them. The plan was plain: write the answers people were already typing into search, put Google AdSense on the pages, and see whether the traffic added up to anything. Coyier had been reading Darren Rowse at ProBlogger and doing the arithmetic in his head. Twenty five dollars a week would be fine. Twenty five dollars a day would be exciting.

One of the domains in that little network was css-tricks.com. The first post went up on July 4, 2007, the date Coyier still uses as the site's birthday. In his own telling it was the least successful of the batch at first, and it was also the only one he actually enjoyed writing. The Adobe sites never got past beer money, and Adobe's legal team eventually made him take them down over the names. CSS-Tricks kept going because comments started arriving and other blogs started linking to it. As he put it years later, that engagement is mighty addictive.

Money followed the traffic rather than the other way around. The milestone anchor here comes from Coyier's own writing: the site launched on July 4, 2007, and in his 2007 wrap up post, published January 23, 2008, he thanks his sponsors by name and writes that the money he earns from having sponsors on the blog offsets the costs of running it and the time he puts into writing and researching. So paying advertisers were on the site inside the first 203 days. He never published the date of the first sale or the amount, so 203 days is the documented outer bound, not a precise first invoice.

For the next five years CSS-Tricks was a side project with a day job attached. In the 2009 review he notes he is still a full time designer at Chatman Design. He later worked at Wufoo, which SurveyMonkey acquired in 2011, and his own timeline records his last day there as May 2012. The 2012 year in review is the first one where he writes that this is the first year he has been able to go out on his own, five years after the first post.

The move that paid for that transition is unusual for a blog. Instead of quietly redesigning the site, Coyier decided to screencast the whole redesign and sell access to the recordings, and he tested the idea on Kickstarter before building it. "To validate it was a good idea, I put up a Kickstarter," he wrote when the new design shipped. The goal was $3,500. The campaign closed at $89,697 from 2,187 backers. Version 10 of the site launched on September 6, 2012 with a members area called The Lodge holding the videos.

The business underneath stayed simple. In the 2015 review Coyier writes that more than 90 percent of the site's income came from advertising, arranged three ways: one primary sponsor for the year, at most one sponsored post a week that he personally approved, and a handful of display slots sold through BuySellAds. Back in 2011 he had already replaced a block of six 125x125 pixel sidebar ads with a single full site sponsorship, calling it a net gain financially and better looking on a responsive layout. Traffic did the selling. In 2015 the site did 72 million pageviews with 86 percent of visits coming from search. The niche search instinct he started with in 2007 never changed, it just had much better content behind it.

The site also stopped being a one person operation. 2015 was the first year with a real payroll and part time writers. By 2020 he was writing openly about diversifying revenue after sponsors tightened budgets, estimating sponsorship income was down roughly 25 percent that year, with a small ecommerce line covering about 5 percent of what was lost.

On March 15, 2022 Coyier announced that DigitalOcean had acquired CSS-Tricks. His reason was blunt: when he started in 2007 he could not have imagined how much it would grow, and by then it was "a far bigger job than any one person can do." He stayed on as an advisor through the handover and then stepped back to focus on CodePen. The price has never been made public. Two years later, on his own blog, he wrote that the negotiated sale price was fair, laid out what he and his wife had weighed before agreeing, and admitted the outcome afterwards was not what he hoped: DigitalOcean cut the content and community team in 2023 and publishing stopped for about a year. He even pitched taking the site back in exchange for running it again. That went nowhere, though publishing resumed in mid 2024 under the editor he had originally hired.

Fifteen years, one founder for most of them, and a revenue model that was settled in the first six months.