Adding Testimonials to your Joomla site

Any site that sells products or services needs a testimonial page. Those personal accounts and recommendations give your site credibility and increase your ROI.

The best testimonials you can post are video testimonials

The best testimonials you can post are video testimonials. If you host events or meet clients, take a video recorder with you, even if it’s just your iPhone or a Flip cam. Before your clients leave the event, ask them to speak about your product or service and record their comments. The clip doesn’t have to be perfect but try to find a quiet corner with a solid background that’s not too busy.

Post the recording on your YouTube channel and  be sure to give it a good title description, something like: “iJoomla Ad Agency Testimonial and Review.” The title will help people who are looking for testimonials about your product to find them.

Once your video testimonial is on YouTube, you can easily post it on your site. Because that testimonial is one of the most compelling arguments for selling your product, I recommend putting it in a module position above the fold.

Adding a YouTube video testimonial to your Joomla site:

There are many ways you can add a YouTube video your Joomla website. You can download an install a Joomla YouTube video from ‘corePHP’, this module costs $7. Another great option is to use a component called Jumi. Jumi is a handy little extension that comes with a module that allows you to dump any code in it so you won’t risk your HTML editor stripping out important code.

How to add a video testimonial using Jumi:

• Download Jumi
• Install Jumi
• Go to Main Menu and unpublish the Jumi “hello world” menu item. (Jumi developers should really consider not overwriting our default menu item!)
• Go to extensions -> module manager
• Filter with the word “Jumi”
• Open the module and change the title to “Video testimonial”
• Enter the video embed code on the right
• Publish and save module
• Depending on the module position you’ve chosen you may have to resize the YouTube video by changing the width and height inside the embed code

Jumi allows you to dump any code into a module

So that’s how you can put a video testimonial on your site. But it’s much easier to get people to write a testimonial than to talk to a camera and you don’t always have access to your customers offline. If you can’t get a video testimonial, a written testimonial can work well too — ideally with a real full name, website URL and, most importantly, a photo. These give the testimonial much more credibility than text alone.

Adding written testimonials to your Joomla site

The simplest way to do this with core Joomla is:

• Create a new category called “testimonials”
• Add articles with the testimonials to the category
• Create a menu item to link to the list of testimonials in “category blog” style

It’s a method that’s simple and it works, but it’s not great because there is no easy way to enter fields like name, website, and photo, etc.

Adding testimonials using RSMonials extension

Thankfully, there is a Joomla component that does allow you to publish testimonials perfectly and even lets visitors submit their own. It’s called RSMonials and it’s free. A big thanks to Grace from the OC Joomla Meetup where I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago for introducing me to it!

I love this extension because it works beautifully and without any major bugs. It’s pretty basic but it does the work, and any Joomla beginner can use it without too much difficulty. It comes with a component, a module and a testimonial scroller. If you want your testimonials to show without scrolling, install the regular module. If you want them to scroll, you’ll need to install that module.

RSMonials CPanel

Here’s how to get it up and running:

• Download RSmonial
• Install the  component
• Install the module or the scroller module
• Create a new menu item and link it to RSmonials
• Open the settings page and configure your testimonials (don’t forget to replace the admin email!)
• Publish the scroller module

Testimonial Page Created With RSMonials

A list of testimonials will appear on the testimonials page linked from your menu. The testimonials will be ordered by newest first and have a submit form at the bottom. Customers can send in their own testimonials and you can choose to auto-approve them.

You can easily make any changes to the styling and settings.

This is a great extension but it does come with a number of advantages and disadvantages:

Pros:

• Free.
• Easy to install.
• Works well.
• Scrolling testimonials are very appealing.
• Submit testimonial feature is very useful and even asks for a photo.

Cons:

• No way to re-order the testimonials. However you can change the posting date if you want to have control over which testimonials show on top.
• Many of the settings require me to type in “true” or “false” instead of choosing from a drop down menu.
• No way to hide submit date.
• When tested, I didn’t receive notification of a new testimonial.

We have installed it on iJoomla Ad Agency and we’re very happy with it. You can see it here with a scrolling testimonial on the left:

http://adagency.ijoomla.com/testimonials/

Do you have a testimonial page on your Joomla site? If so, how did you create it?