Chris Coyier is a web designer/blogger most prominently know for his awesome web design blog CSS-Tricks. Being a fairly new design blog ourselves we wanted to find out what it takes to run a successful one. So we decided who better to ask then Chris, as his blog CSS-Tricks serves over 1.5 Million page-views per month and is one of the most well known blogs on design out there.

In addition to his full-time work and to running a popular design blog, Chris has also worked on personal projects like Script & Style and Are My Sites Up?

Here is what Chris had to say:

What made you decide to start blogging?

A lot of things combined really. I was just starting learning web design when I first got into the blogging thing. My early days of web design were 1) Install WordPress 2) Find decent theme 3) Customize. WordPress was cool because it had all this functionality going on, so I was designing sites that did stuff, rather than just boring ol’ static sites. So since I was learning all about design and working on these blogs, I thought I’d just put it all together and blog about what I was learning. The motivation came from the fact that I could help people, as well as potentially profit from it if it went anywhere. I was lucky enough that it did eventually go somewhere after a lot of hard work!

What are the key ingredients to having a successful design blog?

Two. That you have something interesting to say, and that you say it well. That means have a voice. Have an opinion. Then put it to the page with some confidence.

What advice would you have for designers who are struggling to get their blogs to stand out from the crowd?

You just need to write great stuff and people will come. It’s as easy as that. Nobody is out there putting together truly amazing articles and then their site sits there and gets zero traffic. If the article is that great, just a tiny bit of promotion is all it needs to snowball into popularity. Which means, if you aren’t seeing any traffic, you need to write better material.

Does a blog really have a chance for success if the only goal is for it to be a revenue stream?

Nope.

Passion, Design, and Promotion – What is a healthy mix that makes up a successful blog?

Passion: 60%, Design: 35%, Promotion: 5%

You need to write great articles. That comes from passion. So that alone is the most important part. That will keep you going no matter what happens. But blogs, and specifically design blogs, are in a unique “practice what you preach” niche. You can’t talk about design or user experience and have a crappy site, that’s just foolish. It’s like a politician preaching family values and then getting caught cheating on his wife. It’s tempting to rate design even lower. Even though I’m a designer and I place an enormous weight on it, I still know that it’s the content that drives the site. An ugly site with great content will always beat a pretty site with nothing on it. I put promotion so low because promotion just happens automatically these days. People love to find great stuff and share it. That’s what I meant earlier with the snowball thing. If you write great stuff, a few people sharing it will turn into a whole bunch of people sharing it and popularity will come quickly.

How do you manage a full time job as well as running CSS-Tricks?

I get to work from home, so that alone saves me a lot of time. I also don’t have the ol’ wife and kids thing that most folks have that takes quite a bit away from free time. So it just comes down to time. I consider myself kind of lucky and in a good place in my life right now where I can dedicate a lot of time to design and building my own projects. That sounds kinda lame and nerdy, but I get a kick out of all this stuff, it’s very enjoyable to me.

The job, while it takes the majority of my time, is also fuel for many of the other things I do. I get ideas for things to write about from working with those clients. So when I get time to do some writing, my ideas are all cued up.

It’s also important to remember that none of this stuff was built overnight. It took me years of building and learning how to work efficiently to get into the workflow I have now. And things are constantly evolving. If I can find a way to shave off some time here and there by doing things differently, I’m all over it.

Any other advice you might like to share to those just starting up a design related blog ?

Don’t do roundups and list posts. There is far too much of that nonsense already. If you are going to, it better have some voice and it better be of equal or higher quality than the stuff that Smashing Magazine and Noupe and Vandelay Design and those type of sites already do.