KINGSTON, Jamaica – The University College of the Caribbean (UCC) has taken top honours in the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica’s (PCJ) Website Development Competition winning the first prize of $250,000.

The five-member team —  Jermaine McDonald, Darren Downie, Chantal Pryce, Orane Campbell, and Michael Brown, scored 80 points with their website,  putting them sin first place.

The site scored highest in all ten criteria stipulated for the competition and was the clear favourite of the judging panel.

Christopher Gayle of the University of the West Indies was the runner-up, claiming the second prize of $100,000.  Competing as a sole operator, Gayle scored 76 points overall, impressing the judges with his site’s novel search features.

Launched in June, the PCJ’s Website Development Competition invited students from tertiary institutions to redesign the Corporation’s official website for a chance to win cash prizes.

Teams were given 12 weeks to prepare entries and then make a 30 minute presentation to a panel of judges to demonstrate the site’s features.

The judging panel included David Soutar lecturer & co-ordinator, Digital Media at CARIMAC, Oraine Godfrey, regional media manager at LIME, Peleshia Walker-Dubidad, project manager with the Central Information Technology Office (CITO) and Kareem Davis, web manager at NCB.

The PCJ will now be working with a web developer to finalise content and data and amalgamate features from both sites into a finished product.

“We wanted a website that would be visually appealing and technologically sophisticated and while we still have some work to do to get the site fully operational, the students have provided a working prototype that can easily be refined,” said PCJ Chairman, Chris Cargill.

“We commend every student who took up the challenge and spent their summer break working on their sites and who also had the diligence and commitment to see their entries through to the finish,” he added.