Your way of developing/printing digital pictures

they key to good editing is making it look like you didn't alter it, at least for most stuff. Most people shoot raw, and try to get a good image out of the camera. after that, adjust the white balance, exposure, cropping, and a little tweaking of the whites/mids/blacks and saturation etc. Do you have an example of what you are trying to do?

completely missed that about the printing. I have a few friends who either do it at home or have access to architectural printers. I think they use to photoshop and it can give them a color accurate print preview

color correction, and your color profiles are key, make sure you know what colorspace they are printing in

does anyone have a website that they usually go through that you can just upload the picture and get them printed out? is this how it works?

I highly recommend Costco for digital prints, for a few reasons. First is they're cheap and they use quality paper. The second reason is that they'll most likely have a ICC Profile you can download and use it when you're editing your photos so they'll come out how they look on you screen. Check out http://www.drycreekphoto.com/ they'll have a list the Costco's in your area that have a downloadable ICC Profile. Costco is also pretty good at making sure their printers are calibrated so if you use the ICC Profile, your prints should look too different from what you saw on your screen (assuming your monitor is correctly calibrated)