Should on-line education be aesthetically pleasing?

I am currently working on upgrading a course from Blackboard CE8 to Blackboard Learn. At face value the course is set up to look very visual with large icons and graphics. However because of the restrictions of the CE8 system the file contents where the student information actually kept, mostly in the form of pdf documents and weblinks. it looks in many ways like the file manager on windows 95. 
Blackboard learn is in some ways much friendlier and allows for icons and a much cleaner approach to the file systems making it look and feel a lot more like a smooth web tool than Windows 95, which is good, but I have found myself wondering... Is it worth it?

I personally think that students are more likely to engage with information that provided for them if it is easily accessible, well labelled and looks attractive. Which would be why publishers spend large amounts of money on the layout and design of textbooks. Furthermore in a digital age where students have grown up with the soft and well rounded aesthetics of sites like Facebook and the BBC I-player this is what they expect from educational websites. Perhaps a clunky, unfriendly system would have the same educational content but this means very little if students are unwilling to use, or fully engage with, the materials because the system is either hard to use or looks outdated. Which could in turn cause students to believe that the information is outdated.