Pick a Theme and Lay Out Blocks

Depending on how many people are involved, this may take a long time. If you have several people who want to help, turn them loose with themes. For now, avoid themes with too many areas on them: it's harder to switch themes in these cases. If you want, do a test by installing and switching among three themes to make certain you're not locked into an idiosyncratic structure.

Decide on your basic block layout: two sides? header? footer? At the moment, I happen to like a left-nav block, header, and footer.

Basics for left-nav can be:

1. Login/registration
2. RSS/Syndication. Very important so that people can keep up with your site via their news reader, email program, or browser without visiting the site. And it's built in.
3. Poll. Some people love these, and others ignore them. It's there so you might as well experiment with it. It also makes a good project for someone or a group of people who want to be involved with putting up the website but who aren't particularly adept at technology.

For the footer, put some custom blocks there such as copyright, etc.

Decide if you want menus somewhere. You can revisit this later. Lots of sites start without using internal menus. Just get some content up there.