“I showed her how she could avoid talking about herself and start talking about her clients. She loved it.”

Getting clients to write their own content for their About pages has proven to be one of the biggest challenges Melanie faces. She consistently warns her clients to avoid using their mission statements to describe who they are. 

“After all,” notes Melanie, “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 greatly prefers the navigation features of Kadence Theme.

The learning curve involved in switching themes has been small compared to the benefits and features Kadence brings to her web design and development work. 

Although she has both Elementor and Beaver Builder sites, she had yet to embrace the block editor. “I still feel it is a giant step backward, although I feel Kadence Blocks is narrowing the gap. I am still not ready to jump in with both feet.”

Some of the additional plugins used at Adcock Creative include Gravity Forms, The Events Calendar, and Events Ticket Plus. “One thing I learned from iThemes Training is to have your starter site and be consistent in your plugin stack,” Melanie advises.

For managing the church end of business for her clients, she uses the plugin Series Engine, Prayer Engine, and Groups Engine. According to Melanie, “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 the block editor. “I’ve started using it for posts on some sites. But I still create templates using page builders,” she says.

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.