Minnie Hawthorne: Historical Preservation Photographer

Portfolio Success Story on the Web

Minnie Hawthorne is a wildly talented, award-winning historical photographer whose work captures and preserves the historical structures of the Midwest. Minnie needed a website to reach a wider audience, market her work, and display her haunting images in their best light. Minnie’s website reflects her personal and professional passion for preserving U.S. architectural heritage and capturing the spirit of lives once lived in the disappearing Western rural landscape.

The Team:

Web Strategy & Information Architecture: Jo Golden
Content Strategy & Creation: Jo Golden
Design & Development: Tracey Holinka
Maintenance: Tracey Holinka

Jo created a site structure based on the main subjects in Minnie’s portfolio and set up a structure to support highlighting featured image subjects over time. Jo also interviewed Minnie before creating minimalistic content that conveys Minnie’s story while letting her photographs take center stage.

Tracey created a custom website design and then developed the website to reflect Minnie’s spirit and showcase her images beautifully. In the process, Tracey developed a special process to handle the images and prepare them for the Web, which included re-sizing and watermarking images and writing special scripts to improve image display and visitor experience. Tracey continues to provide ongoing maintenance for the site and will be adding a full-fledged ecommerce component in the future to help Minnie grow her business with the Web.

(Launched February 2009)

Update: Minnie Hawthorne passed away on June 23, 2011. Her website has since be taken down.