significant digits

I have a table that needs to have the significant digits formatted in a certain way. I wrote some code to do just that and it works, but when i look at the table, any zeroes, after a non zero, will be removed from my number although i may want to keep them. For example, take the number 0.25. I want to format it so that it has 3 sig digits such as 0.250. My code will add the last zero, but back in the table it removes it. Is there a way to prevent this or a fix for this kind of problem?
Thanks
:)

store the data in char/varchar format instead of numeric or decimal.