Completely disagree. Sites that are ugly are generally that way because there are ugly things underneath, such as tag soup (bad HTML code), lazy or inexperienced programmers, or bad requirements. You don't need to be a good designer to write a clean, pretty, standards-compliant site.
Although, speaking of bad web design, a great site for learning from the bad is Vincent Flanders'
Web Pages That Suck. Aside from the semi-offensive name, he offers generally very good usability advise and analysis from real-life bad web sites. I'd recommend it.