We model and analyze the deflections and motions of a shaped microbeam in a capacitive-based MEMS device. The model accounts for the system nonlinearities including mid-plane stretching and electrostatic forcing. The differential quadrature method (DQM) is used to discretize the microbeam partial differential equation. It is shown that the use of 11 grid points in the DQM is sufficient to capture the response of the device. It is also observed that, unlike the shooting methods, DQM does not face the problems of system differential equations stiffness and solution sensitivity to the initial guess. The static response to a dc voltage is first determined to investigate the influence of varying the geometric parameters of the device on the range of travel and pull-in voltage. Analytical expressions approximating the range of travel and pull-in voltage, as functions of the capacitor gap size and microbeam width and thickness, are derived. Symmetric and asymmetric spatial distributions of these parameters are considered. For symmetric distribution, an increase (decrease) in the beam width and/or thickness at the middle with respect to those at the endpoints results in an increase (decrease) in the pull-in voltage and a decrease (increase) in the range of travel. An increase (decrease) in the gap size at the middle with respect to those at the endpoints results in an increase (decrease) in the pull-in voltage and an insignificant effect on the range of travel. The dynamic response of the microbeam to a dc voltage is also determined for various distributions of the microbeam width and thickness and the gap size. It is shown that decreasing the microbeam thickness at the middle is the most effective method to reduce the pull-in time.