An Interview With Chris Coyier

Interview | By Paul Maloney | 21 October 2010 | Comments 32
chris
Today we are delighted to have the pleasure of speaking with Chris Coyier who is the brains behind CSS-Tricks, co author of Digging Into WordPress and is currently plying his trade at Wufoo

Chris is a highly respected designer, speaker, blogger and author and has contributed a great deal to the design niche, he is known for his projects such as CSS-Tricks, Digging Into WordPress, AreMySitesUp and from June 2010 as a Wufoo team member.

Hi Chris, so tell us a little about yourself and what you do?
I’m a designer for Wufoo. I also write about web design on CSS-Tricks.com and have done other various web projects over the years.

You recent left you job and went out on your own, hows that been for you?
Earlier this year I left my job at a small design agency and went straight to Wufoo, so I didn’t actually go out on my own. I had originally planned for that but I don’t think I’m built to be off on my own alone. I can’t freelance because, basically, I dislike it. I have plenty of other projects I could work on, but I prefer team work for the most part and my other little projects are perfectly manageable even with a full time job.

Digging in into WordPress has become incredibly popular, what prompted you to write the book?
It was actually as simple as “hey wouldn’t that be cool to do a book?”, which is essentially what Jeff Starr came to me with. I agreed and we ultimately settled on WordPress as being a good fit as we both had blogs that we wrote about WordPress on but it wasn’t a perfect fit for either of our blogs.

You have done some awesome collaborations with code and writing, that benefits do you find with this approach?
Well you know what they say, one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. I find it helps me understand subjects better to think about how I might explain the concepts to other people. So I do that, through various mediums, as a by-product of my learning new things and building things every day.

WordPress… What’s next for it?
I don’t really know. I’m not on the WordPress core team or close to anybody who is. I’m always wicked impressed with their development cycle though. It’s ambitious and always a good mix of refining what is already there and adding new features out of heavy demand.

The WordPress trademark has been transferred over to the WordPress foundation, whats your thoughts on that?
I don’t know anything about that. I’m sure it’s in the best interest of everyone. Like I said, I’m always impressed with the WordPress team. They always seem to do the right thing. I’d be shocked if I heard of them making a move out of greed or anything even slightly off base.

If you could share one piece of knowledge with WordPress newbies, what would it be?
Don’t panic. WordPress is actually really easy and the learning curve short. It won’t be very long until you realize how relatively hands-off WordPress is about how you build sites around it.

HTML5 looks pretty sweet, is the web ready for it yet?
Despite some recent ridiculous bad press, yes, it definitely is. As many public developers have been shouting lately, HTML5 is a collection of technologies each with it’s own independent time frames on when those things will be ready, and then of course that is affected by what you are building and the audience it is for.

Whats the one code snippet you use daily in your projects?
I find myself looking up the clearfix to copy and paste pretty regularly: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/clear-fix/

A Big Thank You To Chris

You can check out Chris’ personal site here here: Chris Coyier or connect with him on Twitter here @chriscoyier

How To Win A Copy Of Digging Into WordPress

Chris has kindly offered one lucky reader a copy of Digging Into WordPress (thanks Chris!!) To Enter take the following steps:

Step 1

Tweet about our competition to your followers, something like this would be perfect:

I just entered to win a copy of Digging Into WordPress at @GOWPZine! Check it out: http://bit.ly/ayVMtC

Step 2

Comment on this post with a link to your tweet and a couple of lines to say why you should win it!

Terms

The winner will be drawn 1 week from today, the winner that is selected will need to share his/her email address with WPZine so we can get past it over to the chaps at Digging Into WordPress so they can set you up for delivery of the electronic book and contact you with future updates to the book.

Paul Maloney

Paul Maloney is a UK based web designer/developer and runs the design agency Tropica. He particularly enjoys using and working with WordPress and has a keen interest in typography. You can also follow Paul on Twitter.

Visit Paul Maloney's website

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