Our founder, Barb Baranski, started her career as a Nuclear Engineer. The work was interesting, but didn’t satisfy her desire to be more involved in communicating a message to a broader audience. So she gradually shifted her focus more toward technical communication, and along the way designed a document management system (back in the days before the web).

Her first exposure to publishing for the web was in 1998 when she was a technical editor for ISA’s magazine InTech. In an editorial meeting, she and the copyeditor talked about how cool it would be to put the articles from the magazine up online every month. So it began. Over the next nine years, what started as a simple web site to showcase four or five articles every month turned into a 15,000 page web site boasting sophisticated e-commerce for all of ISA’s books, standards, training courses and memberships, members-only content, areas for member committees to share documentation, forums/bulletin boards for various groups, and a complex integration to a member database of over 250,000 names. Barb went from being a technical editor for Intech, to Web Manager, and finally Manager/Director of IT while at ISA.

She spent the next six years at hesketh.com – a Raleigh web agency with a focus on for-benefit organizations. Here she honed her project management skills, and immersed herself in working with her team to solve complex web issues for a wide variety of clients. Along the way, she began working with the open-source Content Management System Drupal – she worked with clients and her team to set up sites, and became more and more interested in understanding better how Drupal could be used – from administration, to theming, to development – to help all kinds of clients meet their goals.

And so Wisdom Web Consulting was born.