I was a little surprised to find that today’s most-emailed article over at the New York Times home page is a piece about the dos and don’t of developing a website, aimed primarily at small businesses. Read it here, while it’s still available.

The Times isn’t usually a publication that offers advice for small businesses — its focus is usually more directed at big-picture economic issues than small business concerns.

But the article is very good, with advice that ranges from such obvious, tried-and-true pointers as this:

Build a bad-looking small-business site filled with poorly written text, and your potential customers will go away. Build one that is attractive, compelling and clever, but crucial design mistakes will still guarantee that few people will know that the site exists.

… to the useful, such as this:

A site must have addictive content, said Vincent Flanders, a Web design consultant in the Seattle area who is the creator of Webpagesthatsuck.com, a site that analyzes why some pages do not work. “People must be willing to crawl through a sewer for it.”

… and this:

Users spend 30 seconds reviewing a home page. A business must encapsulate what they do in very few words.

Either way, the Times has the cachet to pull in some interesting voices for commentary, so if nothing else it’s a fresh look at something most of you might already know a great deal about. Also interesting is their comparison of big company strategies to small ones. “Webpagesthatsuck.com” gets a big mention here, and while we have conflicting opinions about the value of that particular site, it does seem to be getting more and more attention from the mainstream media.

Which in itself is a pretty good lesson to those starting a website: A catchy name goes a loooong way.