At work, i've had various discussions with folks in my group that i'm pretty sure haven't exactly enamored me with them.
We have some outstanding folks who work on user interface stuff and graphic elements. They produce some incredibly top-notch stuff and really take a good deal of well-deserved pride in their work. They're the ones responsible for how a great many sites look and feel.
And i've been telling them that design doesn't matter.
Yeah, i can see why they don't like me, but let me explain why i keep saying that.
i work for the Developer Network. That means, by definition, i'm dealing with developers. Developers, also nearly by definition, tend not to be the most design focused individuals on the face of the earth. Don't get me wrong, they know them some ugly, but if you've ever spent a few minutes looking around sites like CPAN, php.net, or any developer twiki, you'll pretty much realize that it ain't exactly about the pretty.
It's about the information. For them, the most important thing is being able to find, read, and bookmark the docs. They're raised on man pages, so giving them pages of pre-formatted courier new and they wouldn't complain or bat an eye.
That's not to say that you can't make 'em pretty later. Give them nice balanced page layouts and non-clashing colors that, you know, actually appear in nature and may not be selected by near random choice. You can even use creative navigation schemes for sibling documents so long as it's really clear how to get to the next or previous documents that use nifty DHTML tricks and sliding menus.
Geeks won't use those, naturally. They'll find the page using the search engine of choice, and use greasemonkey to "fix" the "broken" parts. Good for them. We should make sure that things are designed so it's easy to do that. That's why it's also critical that regardless of whatever fancy bits you toss on a page, it absolutely must be designed for search engines.
Ultimately the most important thing isn't getting it to look good, it's getting it out.
That's what matters.
