Address Book includes a useful feature that you may not be aware of, as it’s not really fully enabled by default. The feature is the ability to store a URL with a contact—you can see this on the Apple Computer contact card (or vCard, if you want to be technical), where you’ll see Apple’s URL next to the Home Page field label. This field is useful not just within Address Book, but in other programs as well. For instance, a number of Mac web browsers—Safari, OmniWeb, and Camino, at least—include bookmarks for these Address Book URLs, making it easy to access Wweb sites associated with your various contacts.
You may be wondering, though, just how to get the URL into Address Book in the first place—if you create a new card, you won’t see a Home Page field there by default. Solving this problem is fairly trivial, especially for experienced Mac users; if that’s you, you probably won’t learn anything new from this hint.
To add a Home Page field to a current card in your address book, select the record you’d like to modify, then click the Edit button. From the menu, select Card -> Add Field -> URL to put the Home Page field on the selected card. Enter the URL and click Edit again when done.
If, instead of doing this on a one-by-one basis, you’d like to have the Home Page field appear on every card, including newly-created cards, open Address Book’s preferences, and click on the Template button. Click the Add Field drop-down menu and select URL from the list of options. (Feel free to add any other fields you use regularly.)
As soon as you make this change, the Home Page field will appear on all your existing cards, as well as on newly-created cards. Spend the time to populate it, and you can save a step by jumping to a contact’s home page directly from Safari, OmniWeb, or Camino.