Alicia St Rose began her adventure with WordPress when a UX friend offhandedly suggested using the CMS for a mutual friend’s website. That was nearly six years ago and the adventure has turned into a torrid love affair. Now she is a freelance developer, exclusively powered by WordPress, and has yet to find a limitation in this magical piece of software.

She is owner, principal designer and developer at Intrepid Realist Design, a small agency that employs one. In addition to creating for WordPress, she offers WordPress coaching to WP users who are just starting to flutter their wings.

She currently lives in Santa Barbara, California with her two rambunctious cats, Oscar and Milo. She divides her time between that seaside town and Black Rock City, Nevada.

Oh, and her favorite color is red.

Her talk at WCSD 2015 will be on “Functional Design” (design development).

Perhaps you’ve heard of the this mythical creature called the Unicorn? Not the one that dispenses rainbows, but the techie one, the one who designs AND develops for the web. A one-person agency, so to speak. As a front end designer, you may shudder at the thought of mucking through code and regard it as something akin to Alchemy. Alicia is going to demonstrate that learning a bit of code and where to put it can not only empower you but also give you more freedom and control over your designs. Imagine a magical place where you can cast a spell and get the exact results you were looking for on your front end and back end of your WordPress theme. That place of wonder is located in the functions.php file. Go on a short journey where she will show you why the functions file includes the word “fun”!