LEICESTER, Mass — Residents visiting www.leicesterma.org this week will have noticed the all-new, revamped website, and officials hope the change will not only be more user friendly, but also help both citizens and neighbors learn more about all that Leicester has to offer.

"We can now present information to the public with a site that I hope is easier to navigate," said Selectman Sandy Wilson, who spearheaded the project after coming across Virtual Town Hall at a conference.

Believed their focus on designing websites exclusively for municipalities would make them the right fit for Leicester, the idea was brought before the selectboard in July, where members voted 4 to 1 in favor of moving forward with an agreement with Virtual Town Hall to build a new website for the Town, Police and Public Library.

Since then, department heads have been working to get information transferred over to the new site, with Christopher Hoey from the Accountant's office spearheading the day-to-day contact with Virtual Town Hall and town employees.

According to Wilson, the town's department heads had training on the web site last week.

"They were all excited about being able to control the data themselves and not rely on someone else to post the data for them," she said. "The Town Clerk has a very robust site, she put in a lot of work, as did the Board of Health and the Town Planner."

Virtual Town Hall's system features the ability for subscribable E-Alerts, calendaring, photo Galleries, RSS Feeds, surveys, Minutes & Agendas, as well as department news.

But Wilson said "the biggest thing is that you don't have to know which department handles a particular thing, because you can go to the downloadable forms and applications, or there are a couple other places you can go and see a list of everything."

The home page features a Where Do I Go For section that conveniently directs residents to common requests such as online payments, employment opportunities or volunteer applications.

Wilson also hopes that the site will help people looking to come to Leicester "to find the information they're looking for so it's easier to make a decision either to move to town or move their business to town."

More content will be added to the site, which Wilson says is still a work-in-progress.

"There are several place for people to put comments, and we hope people will take advantage of it to tell us what else they want to see," said Wilson.