Hi, I'm after some advice about the best way to implement customer testimonials into a site, whether it be a third party service that allows embedding or something I can integrate directly into the site. I would like the option of a customer leaving a review and the site showing all the latest reviews.

 

This is the first time I will be creating a site which would incorporate this so some advice would be great, thanks.

If this is you first attempt to design a website then you're probably just better off writing their testimonials out in an ordinary block element, rather than introducing a widget of some kind. Plus with some nifty CSS3 you can be creative, like including the quote in a speech bubble such as the kind on this site: http://www.css3shapes.com/ (scroll down to the purple speech bubble shape). If you want to keep things simple though. try something like this (assuming you're using divs):

<style>
.testimonial{
    background: #f1f1f1;
    border-radius: 7px;
    color: #000;
    height: 200px;
    overflow: hidden;
    padding: 5px;
    width: 300px;
}

.testimg{
    float: right;
    height: 80px;
    margin-left: 10px;
    width: 80px
}
</style>

<div class="testimonial">
<img src="customerimage.jpg" class="testimg" alt="" title="">
Your testimonial here.<br>
Your testimonial here.<br>
Your testimonial here.<br>
Your testimonial here.<br>
Your testimonial here.<br>
</div>

This isn't an 'official' way of doing it (no such thing exists), but just a basic box that would clearly show what you want it to. Just a thought.

Don't forget to put the testimonial body in a blockquote element to keep things all nice and semantic.

 

I've used WordPress's commenting system to allow people to leave testimonials so that is an option. However if you're only displaying one or two testimonials from your best projects then there isn't a lot of point in going through the hassle of using a widget.

Here's an example of some nice semantic code for a quote / testimonial i just mocked up.

 

http://jsfiddle.net/dPfHW/

Hi thanks for the replies.

 

I have decent knowledge of HTML 4/5 and CSS 2/3, although I can't program I am able to take prebuilt javascript/jquery and PHP programs and embed them into sites. I have made a few sites now so have some decent experience.

 

The site I am creating is not for me, the person who it is for would like to have testimonials built into his site and have his customers leave reviews.

 

If it was my own site then I could just put testimonials in manually but as its not for me that can't be done.

 

Do you know of any pre-built tools I can embed into a site or third party services that allow you to embed? or any other ideas?

Maybe you can use disquss to add comments to your site?

http://disqus.com/

Edited July 26, 201313 yr by teodora

I would help you here as I have tried out magento testimonial extension on my website which works out well for me. It displays all the recent reviews and popular reviews at sidebar, displays average rating, have rich snippets feature which displays the product details in the google search engine results page and many more. Find more how to implement them, you will find them very beneficial for your website. http://apptha.com/blog/6-tips-to-create-a-marketing-image-for-business-via-testimonials/

Thanks for the recommendations, after looking at them and looking around the web, I have decided to work with http://www.commentics.org/

It looks perfect for what I need, all the various options and buttons in the comments can be switched on or off, you can create permissions in the backend to allow users to only access certain menus, it can be styled, and once integrated into the site I'm doing @throzen I might style it with one of those speech bubbles you recommended in your link.

 

Oh and its free.

 

Not sure if anyone else has come across it before, if so have you used it?

By any chance are u using content management system like wp or joomla? if yes then you can find plugins out there if not they you can just make a css for it if you have html, but if you have a dynamic php page you should have database to store the comments and then query up those testimonials