I've been brought in as an intern to develop a SharePoint site. My team won't authorize the budget for Visual Studio and I don't have physical or remote access to the SharePoint server (running Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 a.k.a. WSS) on the back-end.

So what exactly can I do? I'm a pretty decent programmer when it comes to web technologies like PHP, JS and the obvious HTML and CSS. In an environment like this locked-down SharePoint though, I'm stumped trying to figure out how much control I have with MS's definition of "Full Control".

If I figured out a way to write some C#, I'm pretty sure I could handle my own, but as I said no Visual Studio for me.

Any good ideas of features that people will use on a site built with the limited functionality of WSS and SharePoint Designer with "Full Control"? Can I somehow manipulate the default Web Parts into something cool or useful? Are there Ajax tricks I can do to accomplish something on the back-end?

Thanks in advance, I'm new to StackOverflow and very anxious to get involved here!