A contact page is where you will put information for the staff in your department and show their contact details. It is a good idea to discuss the Contact Page Layout with your admin team to determine if you want to use a sub pages or not, decide on a placeholder photo, determine your chosen categories if you want to use them.
Note: Before you request to have a contact page added to your site, please review the information below.
The web team will create the page structure then a department Site Editor will add the staff members to the new page, and manage the users for the department.
The editor can add staff information and photos, but will only be able to make minor page edits. Editors can insert a banner picture under the page title, or use a text field to add some information about your team, but cannot add categories, or change the basic layout.
Layout Options to consider
The contact page is arranged in a grid of squares with staff information in each square. The grid layout can be set up in in a few different ways.
Sub Page or no Sub Page
- Grid with Sub Page: -Main page will have grid squares with only name, job title and picture (if wanted). Viewers would click on a person’s name to open a separate sub-page with more details for the chosen person.
This type of layout cuts down on the space required on the page and can look cleaner, when you click on Anita's name you will see more info about her:
- Grid with no sub page: all contact details will be on one page - There are a lot of fields to fill out when adding a new contact, but not all of them will show up on the contact square (this is explained below in the Keep Your Information Consistent section).
If the Personal Bio, section is completed, there will be a button to show More Info when clicked, as shown in the examples below:
Use Categories or Alphabetical Listings:
The other layout option you need to decide about is whether you want to organize your staff into groups by using categories.
If you do not want to use Categories then everyone you add will be listed in alphabetical order.
Categorized layout is grouped by specific headings. For example, you could use the job title or area of study/teaching, or sub-department.
The headings need to be determined before the page is set up by the web team. The site editor will use the predetermined headings to assign the staff to their appropriate group as they are added to the page. The headings can be changed or edited after the page is set up, but it is much easier to have the headings determined when the page is initially requested.
Staff Photo Considerations
When looking at the examples below you will see that some staff have a photo, some have a placeholder image, and some have no photo.
If your department decides to use staff photos, it is best to be consistent. If an individual person does not want their photo used, a placeholder image should be used to maintain spacing and overall esthetics.
- This example shows a mix of contacts with photos and contacts with no photos. Without a place holder image the page can start to look messy:
- Using a placeholder image makes the entries line up better, and the page look more uniform in this example:
Keep your Information Consistent
There are 12 basic contact information fields to fill out when adding a new contact but not all of these fields will show up on the actual contact grid.
With a Sub Page layout only the Name and Job Title fields will show up on the main page contact squares for each person (along with a photo if added) as shown in the example for #1 above.
The following fields (if information is added to the field) will show up on the sub page for each contact:
- phone
- email
- local
- Personal Bio Section and Quote
- Social section (icons for Twitter, Linkdin, Facebook and personal web page link)
- Professional Profile section
Only 8 of the 12 fields will show up on a non sub page contract square once they are filled in.
The 8 fields that will show up on a Non Sub Page contact are as follows, and they will appear in the order as shown in the John Doe example below:
- Name
- Job Title
- Phone
- Cell Phone
- Local
- Email
- Building/Room
- Preferred Contact Method
If you fill out all 8 fields for one person, and leave most fields blank for someone, else the page can start to look disorganized:
If you are NOT going to use the sub page layout, you should determine which of the 8 basic fields you want to use for your staff contacts and try to fill out the same fields for each new contact.
Once you have made your layout choices please proceed to the instructions for Requesting a Contacts Page.