Does anyone know how i would go about creating a button within the contacts tab that when clicked, would generate an email with a predetermined set of information about that contact, to be sent to another contact within the database and track these refferals.

I am new to sales force and am trying to finish developing a new layout for my company. I need to make some changes to the leads tab (ie. make the company name not a required field as well as adding some other custom fields). It appears that I can not edit some of the built in fields on this tab, so I wanted create my own leads tab. In order to do this I would want to keep the functionality of the convert button minus the conversuion to an account, I would like to only convert to a contact and still have the option of adding a new oppertunity.