Customer Spotlight:
Melanie Adcock
On resiliency, big goals, and the art of building websites.
Adcock Creative Group is a highly successful culmination of web design and graphic design business services. The husband and wife team of Jay and Melanie Adcock have been operating this full-service agency for more than ten years.
The agency was formed when both Melanie and Jay were both laid off from their careers.
When this challenge was presented to the Adcock’s, Jay found an opportunity working for a large church in South Florida. A teacher at the time, Melanie decided to change career paths and pursue a new life as a web designer with the same church.
A New Beginning
“As their web person, which, back in the day, this was like 2001, the web was in its infancy. Churches were just starting to do websites,” Melanie explains.
At this time, it was off to South Florida and a new chapter in the life of Melanie Adcock.
And the learning curve into a new career began.
A few years later, the pastor of the church that Melanie and her husband were working for decided to leave South Florida for a larger church, located in Mobile, AL. The Adcock’s stuck with him and headed off to Mobile as well.
Melanie inherited the IT position for the Mobile church when they arrived, and focused on building and maintaining their websites. There was a continued learning curve for Melanie during this time, as she was a heavy Mac user and was working on a PC-based network for the church.
Before she knew it, six years had flown by.
“Six years later, when the economy tanked in 2009, it was either lay off one of the church pastors or lay off the two of us… We got laid off.”
“Six years later, when the economy tanked in 2009, it was either lay off one of the church pastors or lay off the two of us… We got laid off.”
But several weeks after being laid off, Melanie was back to working for the church as an independent contractor. With the freedom of now working as a contractor rather than an employee, Melanie and her husband decided to make a move to Newnan, GA where her brother resided.
And this is when Adcock Creative Group began to develop.
Adcock Creative Group Is Born
“We started Adcock Creative with our first client, which was the church we worked for (and were still contracting for). And if you know anything about Southern Baptist churches, it’s like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. One of the pastors from the church that laid us off left to become a business pastor at a church in Augusta, GA. We got a contract with that church. Then we got more church jobs and it just took off from there.”
This was when Melanie first discovered the WordPress platform. It was 2010 and she needed to build a membership website for one of her clients.
The first thing she noticed is that there weren’t a lot of choices for building membership sites. She needed a database-driven site and decided to reach out to a developer named Mike Schinkel for advice.
His advice was to take a look at WordPress for building a membership site, which she did.
“The first plugin I ever bought for WordPress was Gravity Forms. And I still have that $99 per year developer license. The second WordPress product I bought was StudioPress. For that, I purchased a lifetime license that has really paid off. And the third product I bought was BackupBuddy.
It is the easiest WordPress backup plugin to use and it does everything I need it to do. I love the training. That’s what keeps me coming back.”
“The third product I bought was BackupBuddy. It is the easiest WordPress backup plugin to use and it does everything I need it to do.”
Today, the Adcocks still work mainly with churches, doing full-service marketing work. But beyond church clients, they’re also working with nonprofit organizations and retirement home communities.
One of their newest clients is a classical orchestra, which they run a local marketing campaign for. As Hancock Creative Group continues to grow, Melanie says, “We have our hands in a little bit of everything.”
The Challenges of Working With Clients
Melanie says that the biggest challenge they have working with clients is getting website content from them. So she decided to start writing a lot of content for clients herself.
“I had a client and we were getting ready to redo her website. I said to her, ‘let me send you a list of what you really need on your website. And this is what you need to write. And these are the questions that need to be answered on these pages.’ It only took me about 15 minutes to write out the mock content on the key pages, and I turned it over to her, telling her that the rest of the content on her other pages is fine. I showed her how she could avoid talking about herself and start talking about her clients. She loved it.”
“After all, the only people who really care about a mission statement are the people on a committee who were tasked with creating one. Instead, content needs to be focused on the site visitor.”
Getting clients to write their own content for their About pages has proven to be one of the biggest client challenges Melanie faces. She consistently warns her clients to avoid using their mission statements to describe who they are.
“After all, the only people who really care about a mission statement are the people on a committee who were tasked with creating one.”
Instead, Melanie educates her clients that About page content needs to be focused on the site visitor.
When Melanie isn’t writing the content for her client’s websites, she says that another major challenge is getting a consistent voice throughout the entirety of their website.
“When you deal with churches or nonprofits, you tend to deal with committees. And when you have a lot of different people involved in the creative process, it’s very difficult. The goal is to get one point of view and one voice. For the smaller clients, the biggest issue is most often a lack of time. Also, sometimes they just don’t know what they don’t know (as it relates to effective content writing). So I’d rather hand them text and ask them to tweak it (rather than have them write everything from scratch).”
WordPress Themes and Plugins Adcock Creative Recommends
Recently, Adcock Creative switched from using the Astra Pro WordPress theme to Kadence Theme for creating client websites. Melanie has found that, although she enjoyed working with Astra Pro for many years, she much prefers the navigation features of Kadence Theme.
And while she’s only been using Kadence Theme for several weeks, the learning curve has been small compared to the benefits and features it brings to her client web design and development work.
Although she has eight Elementor sites that she took over from a competitor that is no longer in business, Melanie prefers using Beaver Builder over Elementor to build webpages because “it’s more stable.”
Some of the additional plugins used at Adcock Creative include Gravity Forms and Event Calendar Pro because it “integrates perfectly with Beaver Builder right out of the box, which helps you make the design and interface look however you want.”
For managing the church end of business for her clients, she uses the plugins Series Engine, Prayer Engine, and Groups Engine.
“These are really well-written plugins for managing churches and are great add-ons.”
And while Melanie says that she still uses the Classic WordPress editor for a lot of her projects, she’s actively working to get more familiar with Gutenberg.
“I’m getting ready to build a big website for a retirement community and still testing whether to use Beaver Builder or Gutenberg. Elementor is pretty much out of the picture. They’re just way behind as far as basic modules and accessibility.”
For the site security needs of her clients, Melanie trusts iThemes Security Pro to help keep her clients safe from the hacks and malicious attacks that are so prevalent in today’s online landscape.
Future Goals
As the Adcocks move toward retirement age, Melanie tells us that her biggest goal for the future is “…to still have our business, but to be working in it and not for it. My goal is to build a team where I can step farther away and let it supplement our retirement income. Basically, I’ve got five years (to make that happen).”
She goes on to say, “I get a lot of satisfaction out of just doing the work, which is why I haven’t stepped away from it yet. I used to be an art teacher and I kind of stopped doing art. This (building websites) became my art. Additionally, I was always labeled as ‘the anal-retentive art teacher.’ I had like the cleanest art room in the county.”
“You see, I’m artistic and creative but I also like order and neatness. I think web design is kind of the best of both worlds for me. And because I have an IT background, servers and things like that are easy for me as well.”
The past and current success of Adcock Creative Group goes to prove that running a website design and development agency using WordPress was the perfect career solution for Melanie.
We look forward to seeing where they go from here.
“When they start having success with their website, I start looking at other ways they can improve their business.”
Learn more about Adcock Creative Group
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