Set Options and Guidelines for Stories, Blogs, Postings, and Other Nodes

This is worth at least two minutes of discussion at the beginning, but it's good to keep it as loose as possible. The idea is that as many people as possible should be able to update the website: content is what it's all about. If you require taxonomy tags and use views, things will wind up in the right place.

Try to get people to add images to their postings. For most people, this means using Full HTML and enabling the WYSIWYG editor. Fortunately, more and more websites are using these tools so many people know them. 

A great project for a Photoshop user is to create some custom graphics to be added to stories. Things such as a seal of approval for an official posting help make it clear what is a personal comment and what is formal. Allowing multiple people to update the site can make it important to clarify in what capacity people are speaking.

It doesn't have to be Photoshop: plain text also works. Sometimes you have people who are itching to design things. Let the overall site design be a theme that you can periodically replace; put the custom design features into the content itself. It's much more flexible and maintainable.