Now that you have all your resources together and you have an instance of Drupal running, it is time to load up your your modules and your themes.

A) Set up your instance Go to your /sites/all directory. Create a modules and themes directory in /sites/all. Put the contrib modules into the modules folder and the themes that you downloaded into the themes folder.

B) Fire up *AMP and pop over to /admin/build/block to see what regions you have to work with. Regions are areas where blocks can be placed from the block menu.

Blocks are areas that you can display information. They can be lists of nodes, advertisements, snippets of HTML, snippets from sites like flickr or twitter. Once you know where your regions are, you can start sketching out what you want to go where within the general layout. This basically the wire framing process.  

When engaging in wire framing at work we start from the idea that anything can go anywhere on any page. When using a contributed theme that you don't modify, you are going about the process a bit backwards. You need to map out where you want your elements to live limited by what the module contributor has built for you to work with.

C) I generally enable a mess of modules at this point.  Go to /admin/build/modules

1. CCK (Content, Content Copy, Fieldgroup, Link, Number, Option Widgets, Text, and User Reference)
2. Blog
3. Book
4. Color (if the theme you have chosen supports the Color module)
5. Comment
6. Contact
7. Database logging
8. Forum
9. Help
10. Menu
11. Path
12. Profile
13. Search
14. Statistics
15. Taxonomy
16. Tracker
17. Update Status
18. Upload
19. Event
20. Advanced help
21. Checkbox Validate
22. Meta tags
23. Service Links
24. Token
25. Views
26. Views Exporter
27. Views UI
28. Voting API

After these are enabled I go back and enable

1. Legal
2. Pathauto
3. Fivestar

D)  Now we can start to place the blocks that you want to use on the site.  We haven't enabled Adsense yet--we'll get to that later, so you'll want to create place holders.   Some blocks are generated by  modules.  Other blocks are created by the site administrator.  Creating basic blocks is very easy.

1. Go to /admin/build/block and click on "Add Block"
2. Fill out the form

You might want to do a few as place holders for ads. 

In the case of TraumaAdoption.org I also created two bulleted lists using HTML -- one with ten items for Offsite Links and one with five items for Books.  Each of these will ultimately be replaced with a view.  More on that later.

On /admin/build/block you can start to drag and drop your blocks to the places you'd like them to live.  Each of the regions will be labeled.  Disabled blocks are at the bottom menu.  Remember to click "Save Blocks" at the bottom of the screen or your changes won't take.

Now your site is basically blocked out.  The next installment will review building basic content types.