The latest scoop on more than 4,000 Connecticut destinations — tourist attractions, places to stay and restaurants — is now being dished up at www.CTvisit.com, the state Office of Tourism’s newly overhauled website, which debuted Thursday.

Designed and built over the past year at a cost of $400,000, the site is more comprehensive, more easily navigable and more mobile-device-friendly than its predecessor.

“We collaborated from Day One with all our partners,” Randy Fiveash, the state’s tourism director, said Friday in a phone interview. “We did a significant amount of research — focus groups, usability studies, you name it. The 4,000 attractions are double what was on the old site. There are significantly more images, more engaging content, and navigation is a lot more streamlined.”

Information on the site is organized by types of activities (“Do”), accommodations (“Stay”) and dining options (“Eat). Event calendars can be filtered by date range, type of event or region and a special “What To Do This Weekend” option.

“Click on any individual listing, like Mystic Aquarium, and it takes you to what I call a mini-website,” Fiveash said. “A ‘While You’re in the Neighborhood' feature feeds into everything that’s near that attraction. We want to cross-list everything.”

Fiveash said the site empowers the state’s tourism partners by enabling them to manage their own pages at no cost. They can edit their listing, adding information, photographs and videos as well as Twitter and Facebook feeds.

The state’s three regional tourism districts, including the Eastern Regional Tourism District, which maintains the Mystic Country website at mystic.org, are rolling their sites into the state's new site, Fiveash said.

"We think it's a real state-of-the-art site that’s going to make Connecticut stand out,” he added. 

Prior to the site’s overhaul, CTvisit.com drew 3 million visitors a year, a number the state expects will increase significantly.

b.hallenbeck@theday.com