Design Vs SEO: Which is more important to your website

Why do great SEO layouts have to be "hair-raisingly ugly"? You can design a great website that is both SEO friendly and well designed. Besides being SEO unfriendly Flash is also often user-unfriendly as much as many webmasters like to use it - some people do not have the ability to use Flash on their browser (or choose not to) and it also does not make for a great accessible website for some people with disabilities. Focus on using graphics and great content to create a well designed website instead of just going for all the fancy gimmicks, it can be done and has been done many times before. Both SEO and design are equally important - without SEO you don't get the visitors to your website, without good design you don't convert them to paying customers, there needs to be a good balance.