I follow the "learn as you go" principle rather than the traditional way "know before hand". This way there is a place to make ammendments to what you want in between the process.

 For Instance

While creating a website - first things taken into consideration

• drupal CMS for web development
• obviously, link name (subjected to constant revision) for the content to be included
• preparing content for each page
• design/layout images (subjected to constant revision)

1st review - 1st revision

• deciding on the image - used gimp
• including blog in the content section
• creating a launch page - first page of the site
• deciding on the theme for better control over the page - acqua marina(for me, based on intuition I may be wrong but I ll manage)

2nd review - 2nd revision

• lets have a wysiwyg editor - opted for fckeditor
• playing with view to get the desired page/node
• creating image/favicon and integrating with the drupal

 3rd review - 3rd revision

• Have single user multiple blog support - based on taxonomy
• Adding  images/video/audiowith flash player of your choice
• Get hold of admin_menu
• used graffiti for the header
• Try out dynamic persistant menu

4th review - 4th revision

• use cck to create a content type
• create a non-commentable blog/qjournal
• create a region in the aqua harbour theme
• advanced help module ... installed

5th review - 5th revision

• Change the theme to basic.. for better ctrl since its divided into only 4 regions and my consistent look works well with it.
• make use of blog client
• pathauto for alias
• wiki
• image/video gallary
• tagadelic for tag clouds (or) drupal block with 3d tag cloud
• smiley for drupal comment page
• hierarchical order of displaying terms in the URL

6th review - 6th revision

• Added date, calender and email type for creating the content type
• Include contact form
• added emfield so that the images as well as videos can be imported from the 3rd party sites hence conserving space.