I have to disagree about animation. It has to be used only when absolutely necessary, such as showing a clip.

People don't like unnecessary animation - they are great distractors, if they don't add value to undertstanding the content and allow the visitor to get what he wants.

The best thing you can do for a t-shirt photo is to put it on a person (or better yet, of the same gender as the buyer), and make a couple of pictures of it: small, medium, large. Then you link from thumbnails to the large picture so the buyers could look at it. That's it, no animation.

Where 3D graphics could be useful is for shoe shops. One needs to look at all sides of the shoe, while t-shirt shape/form/quality is relatively predictable.

Websites shouldn't be done for being interesting design wise. They should be created interesting for the people, who are looking for information or something (useful) to do. Craigslist looks ugly, has no animation and is somehow one of the most visited sites on the Internet (or at least the most popular classified site).

Thanks for stopping by.