If you're looking to put a list of people and their contact information on your website then the Contacts Directory is the way to go. You can have as many Contacts Directories as you like but each one allows you to categorise your contacts so that visitors can easily find the people they're looking for. If you're wanting to just list general information about your staff or BOT members then you might be better off using the Profiles Area instead.
When you add a Contacts Directory you need to give it a Name and an optional Description:
You can then click on it and add a new contact to the directory:
As you can see, there's plenty of scope as far as the type of information you can record about each Contact. All of the information is optional except for the name of the contact. If you don't enter a certain piece of information it won't show up in the directory on your sites front-end.
A special feature of the Contacts Directory is the ability to define Categories on the fly when you're adding a Contact. For example, if you realise that the Contact you're adding doesn't fit into any of the categories you've already used you can just type in a new one into the Categories box. A Contact can belong to many categories at once. To do this you just type them in seperated with commas.
Categories are also optional. If you only want to list all the Contacts in one big group just don't type in any Categories. When you've finished adding your Contacts you can view the list of contacts on the website:
As you can see I've added some contacts and have used Categories to seperate them out. Spike@School automatically creates a 'jump list' at the top of the page so that users can quickly jump down to the category they want to view.
Oh, and one other cool thing: We present your contacts on your website using hCard technology. You won't actually notice it but the content of each contact is encoded in a special way so that people with hCard readers are able to scan the page with them and pick up the contacts and add them to their address books:
Since hCard readers are still in their infancy we provide the facility to download the contacts (either together or seperately) as vCards. vCards can be ready by programmes like Outlook. This means that a user can still easily add these contacts to their address book!
