So for start i would setup Acquia from acquia.com and see their set of modules and their setup. Its a project based on Drupal (led by Drupal initial creator). It uses many of the modules and tries to make the system a bit more user friendly and feature rich.

Then after you get familiar with some of the concepts get the newest drupal release and install modules listed below.

• Administration Menu - nice fast menu at the top of the page
• Google Analytics - flexible way to track activity of your visitors
• Pathauto - generates SEO friendly urls for your pages
• Printer-friendly pages - makes printer friendly versions of your pages as well as easy pdf generation
• Views - complex but extremly powerful module. Will let you make all sorts of lists
• Fivestar - great implementation of flexible and very easy to setup fivestar rating widget
• Voting API - used by fivestar and other modules of that sort
• DHTML Menus - very nice roll down menu
• FCKeditor or Tinymce - WYSIWYG editor so you dont have to know html at all
• Taxonomy menu - menu items built based on taxonomy terms
• CCK - very powerful, lets you define custom web content types and add fields
• jQuery media - displays images, pdfs, flash and video, just attache them to the node and its done!
• node clone - lets you copy a node
• video filter - add url to video on one of the video sites like you tube and have it shown in the node body
• Lightbox2 - nice poping up images
• Webform - simple forms like contact us etc.
• Rules - Lets you setup triggers and actions so that certain things would happen in the system on special events. For example send email when user logsin for the first time or send mail to creator when comment added to his/her blog post.
• Click Heatmap - can be used with google analytics to track which parts of the website are clicked most often

This should be a good start. Once you get familiar with jquery media, fckeditor / tinymce and views you will be able to find more modules that fit your needs.

Also these two links might help to find some more modules:

http://drupal.org/project/Modules
http://drupalmodules.com

Below some of the nice themes sites:

http://drupal.org/project/Themes
http://themebot.com/website-templates/drupal-themes

Now lets get to work!