Most people tend to take Web sites for granted. Nobody bothers to learn what genius is behind designing what page.

This is, of course, unlike most other artist mediums where everyone knows the author of their favorite book and director of their favorite movie.

Well, meet Sacramento State computer science majors and web page designers Joseph Miguel Galan and Juan Carlos Vega, who recently took first place in the National Web Design Competition (NTCC) at the 25th Annual Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) National Technical and Career Conference, which was held in New Orleans, LA.

The NTCC is the country’s largest technical and career conference for Hispanics. Every year, thousands of engineering professionals, students and corporate representatives attend the conference to partake in competitions as well as educational, technical and career opportunities.

Commenting on his first competition, Galan said, “Honestly, I was just so happy to be in the top five…I was expecting to be there at least, because I really killed myself to get this stuff done.”

For anyone unfamiliar with this sort of web design competition, here’s the break down: Teams of two or more people register to compete in the conference and are given specifications of a web page to be completed in four days.

A hard copy of the web page is handed to a panel of judges (made up of engineers from Microsoft) for close evaluation, followed by a half-hour presentation by the team on everything done in the web design. After more critiquing, the judges make their final decision. So what made the two Sac State engineers stand head and shoulders above the crowd during the competition process?

Galan said that the Web site assigned for the competition had to consist of a front page and three links with information.

Despite an extreme time constraint, he and Vega arduously traveled the extra mile on their Web site and included 17 links, menu bars and a database that would allow people to pay for registration fees online.

Currently, Galan and Vega are designing the Web site for the 2003 West Coast Career Conference in Las Vegas, in addition to starting their very own company, “Vegalan.”

Visit their bilingual Web site at www.vegalan.com to discover the business solutions they offer clients and see what the fuss is all about.

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