The Web is constantly evolving as technology improves and web site design is evolving right along with it.

Online businesses are slowly realizing that the saying “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t always apply to their web sites.

A successful, high-traffic web site requires a lot of work in the areas of design, content and search engine optimization.

Web design has grown by leaps and bounds from the days of blue text on black backgrounds, type that goes all the way to the edge of your screen and beyond and sites that are packed with graphics.

Now, both web designers and online business owners are paying much more attention to how their web sites look and function. The following are 7 of the hottest trends currently in web design:

1. Design for Function

While the overall look of your web site is important, good looks will only go so far with visitors. Your design should be used to enhance your content as opposed to competing with it. The message you have for your visitors is what brings in sales, not how pretty your web pages are.

Most site owners and designers now recognize that the functionality of a web site is more important than how it looks because, if people can’t find their way around and purchases can’t be easily made, then the site has failed to do its job.

2. Colors

Back in the “old days” of the web it seemed as if the color palette people drew from consisted of eye-burning neons or black. Today the shift is more toward soft, neutral colors. Many designers are using gradients and reflections to make the site feel warmer and more inviting. Color palettes are leaning more towards earth tones, which don’t stand out or cause people to lose focus on your content.

3. Simplicity

While graphics and Flash animations continue to grow in complexity, the best web designs go for a simple approach. If you look at sites like Apple, Ebay and Amazon, you”ll see simple, easy to navigate designs that draw customers in and make their shopping experience as easy as possible.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the remaining 4 design trends for web sites.

In vogue for web site design where statistics are concerned, are keeping your numbers relatively private, and putting the focus on the quality of your site. Learn more about common web statistics terms mean, and learn how to see what they mean for your site.

A hit, for example, is generated by each object that loads on your pages and registers with a web browser. That means if you have 5 graphics on a page, each one of them will register a hit. More important is a web page view, or page view for short. That measurement tells you that the page loaded successfully in your visitors browser. If you have an informational site, it may be important to have more page views - no one wants to have a resource site that people immediately click away from, for example. Conversely, if most of your blog readers follow you by your feed, you’ll only get a page view registered for each time they access your feed, no matter how many entries they read.

In these cases, it’s even more important to count the visitors. The visitors are counted by the number of times a unique address, computer or person visits your site. Sometimes, the address that would normally determine one visitor is shared, so when visitors go by unique IP address, as they are called, it isn’t always accurate.

It may under-estimate how many visitors, in the case where an Internet Service Provider such as AOL, may use the same IP address to represent all the visitors from one particular area. It may over-estimate how many visitors are coming to your site in the case of an auto-surf program or purchased visitors that aren’t generated by re-directed expired domains or manual surf exchanges. Your web visitor log or statistics program may register thousands of visitors from thousands of IP addresses, and yet none of them view your site.

A more reliable way to measure is by a program that places cookies on a remote user’s computer to track their visit, however some visitors don’t like them as much and may block them. The Google Web Analytics program uses cookies to track visitors, and is free.

If you have visitors that you think will have a problem with cookies, add the purpose of the cookie to your site’s privacy policy. Before you use a program that includes cookies, weigh the probability that more sophisticated users will block them, or not use your site, against how valuable having that data will be in helping you server your clients better.