Corel.com: public site for Corel Corporation, 1999/2000

Christopher Ross

2 min read

WordPress & CMS engineering · Fort Erie, Ontario

Screenshot of corel.com from January 16, 1999: the pre-September-2000 Corel Corporation homepage featuring the CorelDRAW 8 for Power Macintosh hero, WordPerfect Suite 8, Linux teaser, and the e-Store entry point.

Corel Corporation®’s public site in the late 1990s ran to roughly 30,000 pages spanning 20 product lines, about 1.7GB of HTML, image, and downloadable assets. I joined the team that produced it, helping conceive the user interface and producing graphics for specific event surfaces: corporate-strategy announcements, quarterly-reports collateral, and product-launch creative.

Screenshot of corel.com from January 16, 1999: the pre-September-2000 Corel Corporation homepage featuring the CorelDRAW 8 for Power Macintosh hero, WordPerfect Suite 8, Linux teaser, and the e-Store entry point.
corel.com homepage, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, January 16, 1999.

Archived capture (January 1999): view corel.com on the Wayback Machine. Period attribution: Rodonic Corporation portfolio entry, 2002 capture.

The work

The site was retired in September 2000 and replaced with a re-platformed corel.com. The toolchain was period-correct: Corel XaRa for vector graphics, WordPerfect® Office 2000 for documentation, Corel R.A.V.E. for animation, CorelDRAW® 9 and 10 for production art, with helper applications around them.

I was on the Corel web team: graphics layer, UI work, and a slice of the publishing pipeline. The credit is shared with everyone else who shipped the 30,000 pages alongside me.

Anything is possible with a creative and dedicated team.

From my original 1999 portfolio note on this work.

Other Corel-era properties

Same web team, same period: the Corel LINUX Community, the CorelCity.com portal, and the Corel Store at buy.corel.com. Same shape as my website-design and development practice today, scaled to the 1999 web’s tooling.

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