sharepoint sharepoint-designer windows-sharepoint-services

What exactly can "Full Control" with SharePoint Designer accomplish?

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 familiar with web technologies like PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. However, since the environment is SharePoint, I'm stumped trying to figure out how much control I have with Microsoft's definition of "Full Control".

If I can write some C#, I'm pretty sure that would be sufficient, 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 eager to get involved here!

Solution

You can actually accomplish a LOT in SharePoint outside of a custom .NET solution. Some recommended learnings are:

JavaScript/jQuery - Know how to interface with a WebService using jQuery. SharePoint exposes a number of very useful WebServices in the /_vti_bin directory. Click here for a list: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms479390.aspx. For example, I recently built a scrolling slide-show webpart entirely using jQuery and SharePoint's built-in webservices that pulls from a provided picture library.
DataForm Web Parts. Do some searching around on what these are and how they work in SharePoint. The tl;dr of these is that they're databound webparts that are bound to an SPDataSource and then rendered using XSLT to format the bound data. You can work with these in SharePoint designer, completely through the markup of your aspx page.
Do some searching on "customizing sharepoint list forms." The NewForm, DispForm and EditForm of any list or library can be customized to have behaviour or content added to them.

Those are just off the very top of my head...

EDIT:

I forgot to also mention http://www.muhimbi.com/Products/SharePoint-Infuser-%28Free%29.aspx

I've been meaning to check this out, since the concept is sound. I haven't tried it out myself but it will save you a lot of hassle when it comes to adding custom script that encompasses your entire site.