Some of the things needed for a first-time setup:
<ol>
<li>Enable the CiviBartik theme, for Civi admin, and then immediately configure various blocks to NOT appear in that theme (remove everything from column two, so that you get a wide display)
<li>enable the [http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/introduction/components/ components]
<li>check/enable permissions (Drupal)
<li>set the message template for mailings
<li>setup custom fieldsets and data fields. Before you do this, learn about Option Groups
<li>map import data to fields, groups, tags. Also do a large amount of data wrangling (normalization; and ETL) to get source data in a format suitable for use with CiviCRM. The data that I have is "composite" because it has individuals embedded inside organization records. So I needed to extract and flatten out contact records from their organization records; plus create and maintain a simple "external ID" system to relate them after import. This means parsing, slicing and dicing, string manipulation and making corrections or formatting data a particular way. I almost installed Pentaho Data Integration (kettle) because that tool is (supposedly) built for this job. <ref>But like since version 3, Pentaho still doesn't work even at 5. The install docs are missing. The thing failed to even load, with no error.</ref> <li>Be sure to tag each import with some unique tag. You can always remove those tags later (easily). When you inevitably run into problems during import, the proper way to delete records is to search by tag, and delete.
<li>Option Groups. There are many things in CiviCRM that are already configured as "Option Groups". "Website" is one example. When adding an Organization or Contact, and you want to enter data about their website, it could be one of many types: main, work, personal, facebook, twitter, pinterest, github etc. These are defined in the option group for "website". You can modify these to suit your data and your needs. As another example, "Campaign Type" comes defined as 'Direct Mail', 'Referral Program', and 'Customer Engangement'. I added 'Marketing' so that I can do a generic (email/web) marketing campaign.
<li>If you plan to use the CiviCase component to manage the common constituent "projects" or "workflows" and their associated timelines, then you'll need to create your own "Case Types". Look at the existing "Case Types" for reference.
<li>{{todo}} review [http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Managing+Scheduled+Jobs docs] and setup cron to do things like geocoding
</ol>
Interestingly, CiviCRM optionally uses <code>[http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ wkhtmltopdf]</code> to convert HTML to PDF