I use the .htaccess file a lot on hosted servers. On our own servers I prefer to use the httpd.conf as it performs better and is not reevaluated on every request. But if you are on a hosted server the .htaccess is your earliest port of call for handling incoming traffic and can be more efficient than using modules for certain tasks. One common gotcha is how to discard the querystring for a redirect.

Quick note: On a site I worked on recently I made a change to the Pathauto settings and needed to create a load of Redirects for previous URLs. Fortunately there is a quick way to do this using wildcards in the htaccess.

I plan to put together a comprehensive Golive check sheet covering SEO and site setup generally - but in the meantime here are some useful steps to remember:

Creating a multi-site set-up on your local server or development PC is a must for local development and testing.
A handy practice is to set up one drupal installation and then create your development sites as individual sites on a multi-site set-up.

One of the most frequently asked questions for a new Drupal installation is - How do I get the search box to show? The answer is go to Modules and locate the search module in the core modules and enable it - it is disabled by default. Another gotcha here is checking your permissions and ensuring that users have access to search and other facilities.

See your first user permissions and roles

To be able to add an image field to a content node that will be displayed in the node and as a thumbnail in the listings.

See http://www.blip.tv/file/316842 for a good tutorial

The tutorial covers it well but is for 5.x so the following updates are required to do it in 6.x.

Some of the functionality will be in the core of 7.x.