If you sell a product, offer a service, or if you just want to improve the overall perception and branding of your blog, then adding testimonials to your blog is a great idea. You can easily add a WordPress plugin that helps you to manage testimonials on your blog.
[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/testimonials.swf[/evp]
Just search for the term “testimonials,†and look for the plugin called Testimonials Manager, and you can install that plugin automatically or install it manually to your WordPress blog.
Once you’ve uploaded the Testimonials Manager plugin, just activate that plugin, and you’ll see a new menu item here, right under Comments, that says Testimonials. So just click on that.
And then you can either edit the existing testimonials or you can add a new testimonial by entering the name, the company, the website URL, and the actual testimonial itself. And you can either use a Gravatar if you know the email of the person, or you can upload a picture, or you can choose to not display any type of image at all. So I’m gonna show you an example here by uploading a picture from my computer, alright, and there are some restrictions on pictures though, and then you just put in your name. Sorry, the name of the person who gave the testimonial, and the company name, and the company website.
And then answer your full testimonial in this section here. And then click on Create Testimonial. Okay, so this is how my new testimonial looks like, and of course make sure that you use the actual picture of the person and not a stock photo or something like that. And if you scroll down, you can actually see that you can edit the custom CSS for the testimonial page which I’ll show you how it looks like later, and to display all the testimonials on a single page, you just need to copy this code and put it onto a new page on your WordPress blog. So in my new page, I’m gonna call this Testimonials, and I can add text here if I want to, but I’m just going to paste the testimonials code and then I’m gonna update this page.
Now let’s see how the testimonials page looks like. I’m just gonna click on View page.
So you can see all your testimonials as you’ve entered earlier would appear on a single page on your WordPress blog, with the actual testimonials at the top left, followed by the image or the Avatar, depending on what you have selected earlier, and then the name of the person who gave the testimonial, the company name, which is hyperlinked to the company URL.
Now, you can also randomly display some testimonials in your WordPress sidebar. Now to do that, you just need to go to Appearance and click on Widgets. And then look for the Testimonials Manager widget, and I’m just gonna drag this and put into the sidebar where I want to use it, and you can give this widget a title. I’m gonna leave it as Testimonials, and then you can select the number of items to rotate or randomize in your sidebar, so you can leave it as 3 or you can even have one testimonial which is displayed or more, according to how exactly you want to position your testimonials and how much of space you have on your blog.
And then you can also edit a custom CSS which changes the appearance of the testimonials.
And finally, there would be a link on your sidebar to the full testimonials page. So since we have already created a page and entered the correct testimonials code, now this, which will automatically detect pages that have the testimonial code, and in this case, just one-page testimonials, so I’m gonna click on Save.
Now, let’s take a look at the blog again, and this is my sidebar area before I added the Testimonials widget. So I’m going to refresh that. Alright, and you can see the 3 testimonials that I’ve entered so far in my sidebar area, and all these testimonials will be randomized so that a different testimonial appears on top, et cetera, depending on how much, or how many testimonials you’ve chosen to randomize in this section, and then there’s a link that says Read More which, if you click on that link, would take your visitors to the full testimonials page.
So that’s how easy it is to display testimonials on your WordPress blog, which really is very important and acts as social proof for your products, for your services, or just for your blog in general.