I recently had the task of creating a new theme for a Confluence-based corporate wiki in time for a big launch date.

There were a few restrictions on how I could do this, including:

• There is no user access to the Space's Page Layout features, which means that any changes needed there must be sent to an administrator to be added to the site. 
• There is no user access to the server, so editing stylesheets would have to be through the application or by giving them to the admin to upload. We could put assets on another server but sometimes this can cause security issues with browsers, coming from mixed security level domains. Similarly, every image to be used at the Space Page Layout level would have to be sent to an admin for upload. 
• The Documentation theme was not available to us yet. 
• ThemeBuilder was not available yet. 
• And - it goes without saying - the schedule was tight.