On the other hand, take Etoys Etoys, before its demise, was widely known as having the strongest investment in Perl technology in Southern California. They often had merlyn there for instruction/consulting and they were the commercial proof-of-concept for Template. And they too, were at the forefront of marketing-driven dynamic content generation. However, the weight was too heavy on technology. The webpages at Etoys had lots of blank space all over the place. The images looked like they were scanned from an old newspaper. It was ugly. Thus here the web developers did their job, but did not engage in synergy with the designers and content managers.

I can't think of a site where the design is great but the core computation is poor. Heck, who needs web developers anyway? Yahoo doesn't support web development for their webhosting. They say just use Mivascript to do everything from forum building to guestbooks to chat and more!