Corel store at buy.corel.com: e-commerce extension of corel.com, 2000

Christopher Ross

2 min read

WordPress & CMS engineering · Fort Erie, Ontario

Screenshot of buy.corel.com from August 15, 2000: the Corel Store homepage with product grid for CorelDRAW 9, WordPerfect Office 2000, Corel LINUX OS, and CorelDRAW 8 for Macintosh.

buy.corel.com was the e-commerce extension of corel.com: Corel Corporation®’s online store and channel-marketing surface, with millions of global product users in the catalogue. I designed and produced this site as a member of the Corel web team, working to mirror the visual treatment of the main corel.com homepage so the store felt like a continuation of the brand, not a separate property.

Screenshot of buy.corel.com from August 15, 2000: the Corel Store homepage with product grid for CorelDRAW 9, WordPerfect Office 2000, Corel LINUX OS, and CorelDRAW 8 for Macintosh.
buy.corel.com, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, August 15, 2000.

The work

The store had to surface a deep product catalogue with channel-partner routing and locator paths to physical resellers, easy enough to describe, harder to execute on the static-HTML web of seventeen years before the WordPress block editor existed. The site mirrored the corel.com homepage’s visual language so a buyer crossing from the corporate site into the store landed on a page that read as the same property. Toolchain matched the rest of the Corel web estate: Corel XaRa, WordPerfect® Office 2000, CorelDRAW® 9 and 10.

I designed and produced the site as a member of the Corel web team. After Corel, David McGregor and I co-founded Rodonic Corporation, where the period attribution for this work was first documented.

Other Corel-era properties

Same web team, same period: the corel.com homepage, the Corel LINUX Community, and the CorelCity.com portal. E-commerce continuity work: making a buy-flow feel like an extension of a marketing site, still maps to my website-design and development practice today.

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