About Conrad Chavez

Thanks

I would like to thank Céline Cruz, Massimo Pesce, and Ines Camilla, and the contrade of Siena, Italy. Céline invited me to the event and inspired me with her photographs of Il Palio. Céline, Massimo, and Ines provided valuable context and historical information about Il Palio, the contrade, and Siena. This Palio website simply would not have been possible without their help, support, and friendship. Thanks to them I learned much more than I could have from books and online research.

Inspiration

I created this web site to share my experience of Il Palio, and to try out new web design techniques for presenting photography. I had specific goals:

• Present sets of photographs as stories.
• Be easy to read on all screen sizes, from desktop and laptop to tablet and smartphone, and support touch gestures.
• Effectively showcase and share photographs, but balanced intelligently with techniques to protect against unlicensed reuse of images.
• Take better advantage of current web technologies.

This site meets those goals. It presents photographs in the context of stories, using a responsive web page layout that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes.

The layouts were inspired by the story-based photography galleries of sites such as The Boston Globe's The Big Picture. I wanted to see how easy it was to execute designs like those using WordPress. This site is a responsive-layout WordPress theme I customized by hand. The theme is Modernize, by GoodLayers.