You can have a functional site with no design, but you cant have no function and just a design. I'm not saying you have to choose between the two here, just saying, engineering is the meat of all websites, without it, you have nothing.
I would disagree with this. Without design of some sort, you don't have an interface at all, and thus no functionality; all you have is inaccessible backend code. Regardless of whether there was intent to design or not, if there's a user interface, there's design.
I think that's actually where a lot of design failures happen: They start with the misconception that something was not a design process and thus didn't need design thinking. By the time design is brought into the picture, there are often underlying inflexibilities and assumptions about use patterns that have real effects on user experience, and the design process is working at too high a level to solve them.
Is design is more important than engineering? Neither good design nor good engineering can succeed without the other.
>You can have a functional site with no design
That's the thing. You may have all kinds of killer functionality, but if your design gets in the way of my ability to use it, you effectively don't _have_ a functional site.
We both know that the key here is balancing these 2 things out, so we're in agreement ;-)
Even if one day someone establishes a sound mathematical proof that design is more important that engineering or vice versa, what will we have gained from that? Reminds me of the joke about the most important organ in the body...
Then I thought, look what's telling me that.
(emo philips)