It depends a lot on what you mean by "design." If you mean loading the website with pretty pictures, page ranking will plummet. If you mean loading the website with USEFUL content, page ranking will skyrocket. I have an ancient website that is not up to modern standards (and never will be), but according to Google my average position in search rankings is in position #7 on the FIRST page. Pages are ugly and dated, but it contains USEFUL content, much of which is not available anywhere else on the internet. And that content which is available elsewhere on the internet is scattered over thousands of pages essentially making that content USELESS to anyone who needs the information.
Difficult to answer. Does design (as in visual design) matter for automated SEO? No. Not one bit. For automated SEO, all that matters is the semantic structure of the underlying code, and of course that the code is accessible by robots. For manual SEO, the design might matter slightly more, as people tend to share more and view more of a page which they like the look of (if you have two pages with more or less the same information, the one that looks better will normally be ranked higher based on manual submissions, shares to social media etc., hence might benefit from a better visual design). However, "design" of a web-page is NOT just the looks of it - it's the underlying code, the use of proper, semantic HTML-structure, sparse use of javascript for functionality, and so on and so forth. The visual bit is just a very tiny portion of the total design of a website.
Good page rankings on search engine page depend on both the design & fresh data creation on the website. You can make more attractive & unique designs but you should make sure that your design should be Search engine friendly as well as user-friendly. As we all know Search engine bots will crawl & index your website only when the designs are easily understandable & obey all the guidelines. However, when you say "good design", you probably should work on the code & HTML structure to get a perfect layout so that search engine bots will find it easy to index & try putting your website at better ranks on search engine page. If you want both attractive(unique) design & search engine friendly layout design without any technical hurdles like coding & deploying then go to a website - zivro(dot)com. Here you can create a dynamic website with stunning designs that are search engine friendly.
Are you for real? I went to zivro and their landing page is visually FULL OF ERRORS. For example, the search box is ON TOP OF THE MENU. That is NOT good design by any stretch of the imagination. If their landing page is full of errors, what makes you think that their website generator is any good? It is a fair assumption to believe that they used their own generator to generate that landing page garbage.
I took a look at the page in Lynx; much better without the crap graphic design. Straight text may do well enough serp wise. Reported as link spam due to 1st post, crap content. gary
An Attractive and unique web design is certainly helpful but you should also make sure that you have a responsive website which loads faster and your website should also easy to navigate.