"It's been a hell of a lot of work," says John Lusk. But the vice president of marketing at WhitePages is hoping that the $2.5 million overhaul of the company's Web site -- the first major redesign in more than a decade -- will pay dividends as it attempts to create a new place for consumers to find and connect with the people they are looking for.

Obviously, $2.5 million is a lot of money to spend on a Web site redesign. But WhitePages' Lusk said the redesign goes much deeper than a simple change of the corporate logo and the color palette, though those things also have been changed. (From the old purple to a new green and white color.)

"People continued to just think of us as the online version of the phone book versus the place where everyone can find each other and connect," said Lusk.

Perhaps the biggest push for the company -- which attracts about 24 million visitors per month -- is a new online directory that allows users to claim their personal profiles and add cell phone numbers and email addresses. As part of that offering, WhitePages will allow users to edit (and possibly) remove profiles from the site -- a new feature that will launch next month.

That's a tough proposition, since Lusk admits that many people don't want to hand over their personal cell phone numbers or email addresses. Still, despite that challenge, Lusk said that nearly one million emails and cell phone numbers have been added since the site entered testing.

And he's hopeful that WhitePages can leverage its brand equity to accelerate adoption.

In addition to the new directory features, Lusk said that the navigation of the site was tweaked. And he said advertisements are more clearly marked and new ad units (including a wallpaper ad that runs in the empty space of the site's side rails) have been added.

"You've got a much cleaner site, we really took the less is more approach," he said.

Obviously, there are other big players playing around the edges of the people search space, notably Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. WhitePages also faces competition from cross-lake rival Intelius.

"If Facebook ever were to become ubiquitous, we could be in a little bit of trouble," said Lusk, adding WhitePages dwarfs the social network with its 200 million strong database of U.S. adults. "When people want to find contact information, they want to find it quickly. They want to get in and get out and they don't want to have to go through a lot of rigamorale to get to that information."

As part of the redesign, WhitePages switched to Ruby on Rails.

"We pretty much went from being a Web 1.0 type of site to something much better," he said.

John Cook is co-founder of TechFlash. Follow him on Twitter @johnhcook.