Generally speaking, if Design View is not displaying anything, unless you turn on Live View, it's because of structural errors in your html.
Live View is a Webkit browser (Chrome/Safari). The browsers are much better at "guessing what you meant" when they run into code errors in your html than Design View is. Actually, DWCC's Design View seems to be even more picky than previous versions in this department, which is actually a good thing IMHO. Even though it's not saying "hey, designer guy, you goofed up at line 1234" it's still definitely showing you there is a problem that needs to be looked at. Older versions just ignored things and went about their business.
Run your page through the validator here: http://validator.w3.org to get a listing of the errors. If your page still doesn't display in Design View after cleaning up the code, post a link to it here and we can take a closer look.