Do's and don'ts

• LOG what you do on your site to be able to retrace your steps
• don't enable modules for the sake of enabling -- be conservative
• backup all your content, in a searchable way. The content of your site is your responsiblity, there are no automatic backups. The best I can do in case your site becomes unworkable is reload the empty database. Make sure you are able to put back your content efficiently if this should happen.
• don't allow visitors to create (or even request) user-accounts
• the feeds module is in alpha. Normally we do not use alpha versions. But in this case it seemed appropriate give the number of requests for this type of functionality. If you are planning to use feeds, let us know first so we can take a backup of your database at that point.
• don't change the administration theme
• ignore the red alert warnings on the top of your login and admin screens
• start with building your content types, that's the first step