While in Seattle, I made the truly regrettable mistake of jokingly referring to my friend TC’s website as “that ugly site of yours.”

To say that TC was not happy about that would be a deplorable understatement. After huffing and puffing with outrage for a few minutes, he incredulously asked me to show him a site I thought wasn’t ugly. In an attempt to cater to TC’s bare-bones design aesthetic, I showed him the lovely and simple Dooce.com. Well, Tim uses Linux and Mozilla, and Dooce doesn’t look so hot on Mozilla, so all that succeeded in doing was making TC mock my taste. When I tried to explain that Mozilla was eating Dooce alive, TC got even more worked up.

“My site is designed to look clean and act completely functional on absolutely ANY COMPUTER with ANY OS AND BROWSER,” he nearly hollered.

You can see why I spent the rest of the weekend trying to change the subject whenever the issue came up. Which was often, because my beloved TC would not let it die. There are some people you just don’t want to argue with, and a pissed off scientist who’s a little touchy about his web design is definitely one of them.

It did, however, bring up an interesting thought: what’s more important to me: functionality or appearance? Plain functionality clearly doesn’t quite do it for me. Wil Wheaton has a perfectly functional website, but I would still classify it as, well, ugly. Then there are sites like this one that are very pretty, but almost completely useless. Where’s the balance? I don’t know.

But I do know that I will never make the mistake of describing TC’s website (even jokingly!) as “ugly.” It’s functional and useful. End of story.