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The Gap.com provides a positive online shopping experience that emanates professionalism, trustworthiness, and quality. But it is an experience that even small ecommerce businesses can emulate. In 1996, the actress Sharon Stone wore a black Gap turtleneck to Hollywood's grandest gala, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Oscar Night. It was a huge promotional win for the Gap Inc. Stone's fashion choice and millions in good, solid marketing investment since have helped the company achieve billions in annual sales ($14 billion in 2008 as an example). But while the Gap.com, with its many financial resources, certainly provided an excellent customer shopping experience, that experience was something that nearly any good onli...

There are more than 350 online shopping carts. And each week we feature one, interviewing both the cart's developer and a customer. "Cart of the Week" is not a review or an evaluation, but rather an opportunity to learn about a shopping cart from the people who build it and use it. This week, we'll hear from Chuck Marier, CEO of Modular Merchant. He developed the Eugene, Ore.-based ecommerce solution in 2001 for a single client. Today the Modular Merchant cart has roughly 300 active user accounts. We'll also hear the views of Rozanne Paxman, CEO of Scrap Girls, a longtime Modular Merchant user. PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart. Marier: "In 2000, I was working for a game developer, making websites for video ...

All web designers want their work to stand out from the crowd … but what does that take?

In this post I’ll pick a few sites I think pack a punch and I’ll explain why.

[Editor's Note: Mike Kus, Andy Clarke, Brendan Dawes, Elliot Jay Stocks, Paul Boag, Simon Collison and more will be talking about Web Typography, Microformats, HTML 5, CSS3, Creativity and more at The Future of Web Design Tour.]

Less is more

Keep it simple. It’s easy and tempting to try and fill a web page with too much information. Don’t be afraid of space on a page. I’ve lost count of how many times people have asked me “Why is there a space there”? I’m sure this is just pure web page conditioning. People don’t ask the same question in print design. We’re so used to seeing web pages packed with info that when we see a space it looks strange.

Space is good. Let your design breathe.

Also carefully choosing the colour palette for your site can have a massive impact. I think these three examples demonstrate use of colour and space beautifully.

Helveticons

Daffy’s

Annyas.com/screenshots

Images and Typography

Get creative with imagery and typography. Think in terms of poster or book design to further distance your site from the thousands of “Web 2.0″ style clone sites. I just love the typography in the RVLT site below. It’s in flash but even the page loading is beautiful… I wish it took a bit longer!

The fact that some of these site are in Flash doesn’t mean one can’t create just as powerful and effective site designs using just HTML and CSS.

RVLT

Serial Cut

Black Estate

Buck current web trends

Web design is drowing in trends: Gradients, subtle 3D effects, shadows, glows, textures. They all have a place but if you really want to stand out from the crowd do something different. Avoid the current trends, experiment and maybe even set trends!

I also loved the way in which Tim Van Damme threw conventional web trends out of the window in his redesign of 24 Ways. It was also cool to see him experiment with RGBA and CSS3.

Both the 24 Ways design and the Clap Clap design below show how websites can still be beautiful while ditching current web trends.

24 Ways

Clap Clap

Details and Execution

One sure fire thing that will help your site stand out from the crowd is your attention to detail. For example putting real effort into the composition of the page will shine through. Elliot Jay Stocks demonstrates this perfectly with the latest version of his site.

The Boutique Cycles and Checkland Kindleysides both show how attention to detail just raises the bar that little bit higher.

Elliot Jay Stocks

Boutique Cycles

Checkland Kindleysides

So what do you guys think? What makes a website stand out from the crowd? What other sites can you suggest that already do this? It’d be great to here your thoughts.

[Editor's Note: Mike Kus, Andy Clarke, Brendan Dawes, Elliot Jay Stocks, Paul Boag, Simon Collison and more will be talking about Web Typography, Microformats, HTML 5, CSS3, Creativity and more at The Future of Web Design Tour.]

Michael Moran was working in a Thai restaurant when he realized that customers frequently complained about the difficulty of preparing Thai food at home. This was in 2004, in Atlanta. He went to work developing the concept of ready-to-heat Thai sauces that became, by 2006, CurrySimple, a supplier of ready-to-heat Thai sauces. Fast forward to 2009 and CurrySimple offers 16 different Thai sauces on its ecommerce site, CurrySimple.com, and through a wholesale network of over 150 third-party retail stores. Sales are roughly split between the online, retail orders and the wholesale shipments to companies such as Whole Foods Markets. "We ship about 400 orders a month from the website," says Moran, "But that varies, too, from month to month...