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In the Press

W.D. Web Survives, Expands Staff
Program lets photographers build own sites

By Bill Echlin
Record-Eagle staff writer

TRAVERSE CITY - Lots of web-based companies flamed out with the crash of the Internet boom, but W.D. Web Co. of Traverse City survived.

W.D. Web has bought out a competing company, added staff and customers, is profitable and may break $1 million in sales in 2004.

Owners Michael Connors, Kitty Karr and partner Kevin Kelly nearly saw W.D. Web become another casualty. They expected to receive a $1 million investment and ramped up operations and hired people while rolling out a major new Internet product for professional photographers in 2000.

Late 2000, however, the investor backed out.

"I had to walk through the office and tell people that was their last day," Karr said. "We had 20 people and had to cut back to six. We also had to shut our Acme office and move everything to where our servers were located here at the Grandview Plaza building. We were operating out of closet-sized offices."

Just recalling that is painful for Karr. Still, she said, the company is probably better off now. The photographer software and services have turned out to be a huge hit and she and Connors don't have to consult with someone in New York, she said.

Their software and services, sold under the MorePhotos brand, lets professional photographers build their own Web sites, display photos from weddings, family reunions, sports or other events and take credit card-paid orders from customers online.

Photographers pay MorePhotos a flat monthly fee for the software and net hosting services, starting at $49 a month plus a $100 startup fee.

In 1989 Connors and Karr founded the Michigan Wedding Guides, a pair of free-distribution, ad-supported annual publications that gave wedding planners how-to tips. One edition covers northwest Lower Michigan and another the Flint and Tri-Cities region. The publications spawned companion Web sites, which gave the company some experience with Web marketing.

"We fought and scratched and held on like a dog with a bone and went through a number of developers," Karr said about the process of getting MorePhotos launched.

Now the company is rebuilding with 11 staffers. It hosts sites for more than 1,300 photographers and photo labs, up from 600 in April.

"Our main thing is to focus on MorePhotos," Connors said. "I think this is going to be huge. We're still at the very bottom of the market. If you put all online photographer sites together using all the systems on the market, you may have 20 percent of the photographers in the United States."

Karr adds, "Then there's the whole rest of the world."

The company already has clients in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia and is working on a version for photographers in Brazil.

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