Sample set-up in Magento admin panel for a real website

Change the copyright of the website

Go to System->Configuration, choose Design in the left panel and choose footer in the right panel. And then you can input your copyright in the input.

Change the logo of the website

Go to System->Configuration and choose Design in the left panel. From the right form,set the current package as your design package folder name in the Package part, set the templates as your template folder name and set the skin as your skin folder which is located under the package name in the Theme part, and set the logo file name in the Header part. 

Set HTML head under System->Configuration->Design

Change the website favicon icon by uploading a new image.

Set up Default Title,Description and Keywords which will be useful for search engine optimization.

Install a stat tool like google analytics by adding the javascript snippet in the Miscellaneous Scripts input which will be inserted just before the end of html head tag. 

Create Stores and Store Views and do the settings

Go into System->Manage Stores to create the store and associated store views.

Go into System->Configuration and click General on the left panel, and then change all the settings as you want. In terms of specific settings for store views, you just need to change the Current Configuration Scope to the store view that needs to be changed and configure the options for it.

Go into Catalog->Manage Categories to distribute categories to store views.

Go into System->Manage Stores again to set the default store on the website setting page and set the default store view on the store setting page.

After all of the settings, enable Magento caches to make the website faster

Go into System->Cache Management, and refresh and enable all of the caches.
Go into System->Index Management, and re-index all of the indexers.

Set up contact us form

Before setting up the contact form, we need to set up the store email addresses first. 

Go to System->Configuration->Store Email Addresses, and then set up all of emails.

Go to System->Configuration->Contacts, enable 'contact us' form and set up the receiving email and sending email.

Customize Magento Footer Links to meet your own requirements

Go to CMS->Static Blocks, and edit the 'Footer Links' block as you need. The default Magento Footer often including About Us, Customer Service and Privacy Policy and you can add, edit or remove some links to meet your requirements.

SEO Optimization in Html Meta Title, Meta Keywords, Meta Description

Go to System->Configuration->Design. In the section of HTML Head, set the default title,suffix title, default keywords and default description.

Go to System->Web.In the section of Search Engine Optimization, set the value of Use Web Server Rewrites to yes.

Note: Default title if only for pages without a title, so if the title of home page needs to be set, we have to go to CMS->Pages to modify the title of home page. However, we can set title prefix or title suffix to set the common title which should be helpful for SEO for all of the pages.

Add product watermark

Go to System->Configuration->Design and click Product Image Watermarks on the right panel. Since there are three types of product images, there are also three kinds of watermarks that need to be set here.