Thank you all for the info. Reading your posts sent me on an almost endless Google trip. Very interesting stuff indeed. I can see myself doing this a lot!
Based on what I read and of course your input, I see that there is a step between my prototype and the custom PCB boards where I should create a diagram of the board in a software like Fritzing, am I right? Also, for what I could see from the custom PCB providers that you've referred me to, they do the printing but not the assembly. Is that something that I would necessarily need to do myself or is that also commonly available for hire? I'm asking because while I've soldered stuff before (all my 500+ recording studio cables), the scale on this PCB stuff is much much smaller than what I'm used to doing. Plus one thing is to solder a cable to a jack, another thing is to solder a whole project like this with a few dozen parts.
@CrossRoads (fellow Bostonian!), by custom design do you mean that I can post on the forums "hey, I need this and that" and people offer to build this for a fee? Or do you mean that I can tell somebody "here's a working prototype, how much to make it into the real thing?". Or maybe you mean something else!
Again, thanks for taking the time to point me in the right direction.