For a Bose-condensed gas in an axially symmetric harmonic trap at zero temperature, a new trial wave function of the ground and single vortex states is considered based on the mean-field energy functional and variational method. Once the wave function is known, we can explore the particle-number dependence of relevant quantities, such as energy, chemical potential, aspect ratio of the velocity distribution and critical angular velocity for production of vortices. These results agree well with previous numerical solutions of the G-P equation given by Dalfovo et al.