This page contains some common recommended settings for most sites, that will help make your site easier to configure and maintain.

• Go to the Administration > Site configuration > Site information page. Many people don't like to be called "Anonymous" when they visit a site, so you might want to change the designation to "Visitor." For D7, go to Administration > Configuration > People > Account Settings and then make the change as indicated above.
• If there are any modules (core or contributed) that you want to use, go ahead and enable them. Many people do recommend turning on (enabling) the "Path" core module so you can use "normal" names for your pages.

• Turn on "clean URLs" to make your site more user friendly. Go to Administration > Site configuration > Clean URLs. At the bottom there is a link to run the "Clean URLs Test." If it passes, then the "Enable" radio button will become available. Click on that. (If the URLs stop working for some reason here are instructions to unset clean URLs.)
• While preparing the site's initial content, it might be useful to go to Administration > Site configuration > Input formats (Text formats in D7) and set "Full HTML" as the default, but only until the site is ready to go live (then it needs to be set back to "Filtered HTML" for security reasons). After your site is live, it is advised that you keep "Full HTML" disabled, even if only administrators have access, that still poses a security risk. Do this now to avoid a very common problem with building your site.
• Many people don't like having "Promoted to front page" as a default for content, so go to Administration > Content management > Content types and turn that off - in each content type.
• Set your default comment mode. Go to Administration > Content management > Comments > Settings (in D6: Administration > Content management > Post settings) and set the comments to be entered on a "separate page." Make sure that "Preview comment" is set to "Required."

If you want to use the contact form to email anyone from the site, be sure to enable the "Contact" module (see Adding a Contact Form).

• Turn on the Contact form so your users can send you a message. Go to Administration > Site building > Menus (Administration > Structure > Menus for D7) and locate the "Contact" item, it should listed be under the "Navigation" menu. Click on the "enable" link. Remember that later on you will want to go to Administration > Site building > Contact form (Administration > Site building > Contact form for D7) and finish setting that up.