Welcome!
Neon Cricket is a website and graphic design business which specializes in beautiful graphic design for small to medium sized companies, organizations and individuals. My desings are flexible; whether you want clean and simple, or elaborate works of art, I can accomodate you. Check out the Design Gallery to see the kind of projects I've done in the past, as well as example sites designed to give you ideas.
Process
My primary design tool is Adobe Photoshop. I begin every design with the graphics. After I have the feel and look of the site nailed down—the color scheme and the bits and pieces I will use to assemble the site—I take it all into either BBEdit or Dreamweaver for the HTML work. I also design logos, ad banners, buttons, anything necessary for bringing a website together into a polished, finished whole.
Cost
The first thing on everyone's mind is usually, “What is it going to cost?”
I'll cut right to the chase. Most small websites cost around $2,500 or so to design and build. This is because ironically, even though websites are digital, they remain one of the last entirely hand-built products on the market. Your average small website (around 50 pages) takes anywhere from 75 to 100 hours of work! And that's if there's no hangups or major unforeseen techno-disasters along the way!
Since the graphic design stage usually takes the longest, the more elaborate the graphic elements of a page the more it will cost. Also, of course, the more code has to be written (designing fancy doodads, widgets, and dinguses), and the more pages are involved, the more hours the website will rack up.
Some web designers can charge up to $60 an hour or more, but I like to keep the costs down, so I stay in the $25 range. (Plus I don't have a studio to rent!)
If you would like a thumbnail estimate how much a website might cost for your business or info site, figure about two hours of work per page, and add up how many pages you will need. To give you an idea of which pages might be included in your average small website, we've included this chart. Making a little chart of your own (you can sketch it on a napkin if you don't have anything else) is a necessary first step in designing a new site.
We go into costs in more detail in the "Pricing" section of the website.
What You Get
When I finish designing and building the website, I will turn over all files to you on a physical CD or in a Zip file depending on your preferences and the size of the files, including all Adobe documents, images used at original size, etc. You should store these files in a secure place off-line, just in case something ever happens to your on-line site and it needs to be reloaded.
Also, I will include with the original files a secure password-protected PDF containing all of your Hosting and other information, user names, passwords, annual billing dates, and other key information which you will need for maintaining your own website if you would like to do so. Otherwise, I can continue a basic annual maintainance, charging only for those hours that I am actually working on your website.
Capabilities
Because I was trained in the arts, my focus is mostly on the graphic design elements of a website. Currently I work with basic HTML and CSS (static websites). However, I am expanding my education and I am currently learning javascript and MyPHP, so in the very near future I will be able to offer sites with the ability to include exciting movies, interactive widgets, and server-side databases among other things.
If you are interested in contracting a website from Neon Cricket Web Design, contact me (Adah at neoncricket.com) via email and I will be happy to answer your questions. I suggest that you read the "Planning" and the "Pricing" sections to familiarize yourself with what will be involved in creating your new website.
