Cicada Websites was established in 2001 by Andy Davey, a former Royal Navy engineer who realised the potential of the web as a powerful business tool when working as technical manager for a multi-national pneumatics company.

Having built an intranet for the company, then designed and built software which had a dramatic impact on production, he decided that the IT business was far more exciting than pneumatics.

The rest, as they say, is history. Today Andy designs websites from a rural property in Franklin County, south of Auckland.

His philosophy is that web sites are not just something pretty to look at. "There's no great mystery about them. Information goes in. It has to be simple to get it out. It?s not so much how a web site looks, it?s how it works that matters."