I set up on average one new wordpress site a week for various clients. I created my own guideline document of things that i tweak and change once i have installed wordpress on the server.
Please find my list below.
01 - go to settings > general: and change the tag line & time format
02 - go to settings > discussion: and customize the comment settings
03 - go to settings > media: and customize the image dimensions
04 - go to settings > permalinks: and change the settings to post name
05 - go to appearance > themes: and activate theme
06 - add pages (home, news, about, contact etc…)
07 - create main menu, add pages, set main menu as main
08 - set front page to be home page, set post page to be news page
09 - install plugins
I would love to hear what other people change / tweak once they have installed wordpress 