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Always put in the description when creating anything new - lists, libraries, etc.  They display under View All Site Content.  As your site gets bigger this becomes more and more important.  Explain what the item is for an who maintains it.

If you restore a document library or list from the Recycle Bin, it doesn’t automatically display on the Quick Launch.  You need to go into View All Site Content to click on the library, then go into settings and Title, Description and Navigation to display it on the Quick Launch again.

Don't upload all your documents to Shared Documents.  It is a sample folder only which is created with a default team site.  Rather delete it / rename it, and create your own user defined document libraries.  PS : Changing the name of Shared Documents does not change the URL, it will still say Shared Documents. 

When creating Document Libraries remember you need to have separate libraries if you have specific permission, version history or content approval / workflow requirements.

Documents will not upload if they are open, make sure all the documents are closed before trying to upload.

The very loose rule is that if there are 5 items or less in a Choice Field, then make them radio buttons, (less clicks for users).  More than 5 make them dropdown. 

Lookup fields only work with “single line of text”.  You can't lookup a mutliple lines of text, number, date, currency field, etc.

You can’t do grouping on a checkboxed fields.  They must be either radio buttons or dropdowns.

To create a view where the users only see items in a list where their name is mentioned, enter a value of [me] in the Filter section in the Modify List View.

Or go to Settings - List Settings - Advanced Settings and change read / edit settings to Only Their Own.

Column ordering for list items is disabled when Allow for Management of Content Types isn enabled.  You need to re-order columns in the Content Type section instead.  Otherwise deactive the content types, re-order, then re-activate.

Links are also lists.  To manually re-order the links you need to first modify they properties.  Modify the view of all the links and go to the Sort section.  There is an option for "allow users to order items in this view".  Make it yes.  Then go back into your list and click on the Actions menu item to re-order the links.

Use daily or weekly summary Alert Me's where possible as inboxes are already a mess.
Alert Me's aren't available on read only lists and libraries - there's nothing to report on.  You can only alert on items added, edited, deleted or all 3.
Put Alert Me's on your discussion forums so you know when to respond.

When you create a great list or library, (or site for that matter), don't reinvent the wheel every time, save it as a template and re-use it.  (You need to be a Site Collection Administrator to do this).
You can't save a Publishing site as a template, you need special coding to do this.
Sites need to be smaller than 10MB in order to save them as a template.  Save without content to achieve this.

Be careful resizing web parts as they may not print properly when printing the screen. 

Always use YYYY-MM-DD in your date formats when saving documents.  Microsoft technologies count numerically and alphabetically from the left.  If you use this date format, your documents will always be sorted newest to oldest, (or vice versa).  True for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc etc.

Make sure pictures are saved in Picture Libraries (or Site Assets for 2010) on the site they are needed on.  If you don't and the URL's change, or users don't have rights to the source site, they will see a red X where the picture is supposed to be.

Stop emailing attachments in documents.  Send a link directly to that document.  Hover over the doc in SharePoint, Send To - Email a Link.

Keep your AD details up to date.  Those details are pulled into SharePoint and populate your My Site with default information.

Whether you upload one doc, or multiple docs, the default upload limit is 50MB.  Check with your IT dept whether the defaults have been maintained.  It means that no single document can be greater than 50MB; nor any group of docs larger than 50MB.
When you upload a doc to SharePoint, the link is broken to the original document.  They are now 2 completely seperate documents.
See tip #9 about special characters whe uploading docs.

Slide libraries are not available to Office 2003 users.  If you're using that option to compile new presentations, remember to save them as 2003 versions if you have team members with older Office versions.

Add all the internal and external links your team will need, then make your team site your Internet Explorer home page.  That way no matter where you navigate, if you get ‘lost’, clicking on Home will always bring you back to a central starting point.

Start a SharePoint evangelism site - add surveys, training material, what SharePoint is, how it works in your organisation, how to request a site, etc. 

Start small - don’t overwhelm your users.  Take one spreadsheet, one report at a time and convert it to something cool and user-friendly on SharePoint.

Communicate!!!  Send weekly emails to your user base and give them tips and tricks, (take one out of this list every week if you like). 

To re-add closed web parts, go to Edit Page – Add Web Part – Advanced – Closed Web Parts.  (But if delete them in SharePoint Designer they will be permanently removed).

The Content Query Web Part (CQWP) allows you to display documents; announcements etc from various sites and display them all in one place. End users can set them up, but to make them pretty you'll need a developer. 

If you are a developer in charge of branding, make sure you package and deploy the custom look and feel properly or it will be erased with the next software upgrade.  Also make sure your branding is compatible with the out of box themes available.  Heather Solomon is the authority on this.  Branding should only be tackled by experience and specialised developers, a lot can go wrong.  DO NOT remove the default breadcrumbs when designing branding for team sites.  These breadcrumbs are crucial for navigating through the platform by the helpdesk teams.
Leave professional branding to the professionals.  You don’t need to go to those extremes on a ring-fenced team site.  If you are trying to make your site “look pretty”, use the CEWP and PowerPoint to do so.

Last research showed that hyperlinks are the most used features on sites, followed by buttons then back buttons.

Site layout is very important – too much white space may force too much scrolling and look as though your site does not have enough information; while too little white space can make your site look cluttered.

Text formatting is crucial.  You don’t want users squinting or zooming to read anything.  Size and colour of the text will impact the user’s decision to stay on the site, especially if it’s too large or colourful.  Don’t use fancy fonts unless you are sure all your users have them installed.  They will look like Times New Roman or Arial on their screens instead.

Have an option for users to comment on your site or provide feedback.  Do surveys to ask them what they'd like to see.

Take background and font colours into consideration.  Don’t make them the same or similar colours or they will be impossible to read.  Also take colour blind users into consideration, red text on blue backgrounds are a problem (and also terrible).  Hyperlinks don’t work on dark green backgrounds either, impossible to see.
Blind users need special settings on all items built into a site, ask your IT dept about these.

The power of wikis comes with properly built navigation.  When embedding pages, make sure you have links to the index page as well the landing page of the site.  New users may not understand how to navigate around SharePoint yet.  Put all the navigation links in the same place and make them look the same.
Use the same formatting / look and feel across all pages in the same wiki.  Different wiki’s can have different look and feels, but the pages inside them must all be the same.
The wiki-speak brackets only work in wikis, nowhere else.  [[ ]]

Workflow associations are lost after 2 months.  What this means, is in your document library, you will only be able to view the “Approved” field for 2 months.   If your projects are subject to audits, this could be a problem.  Discuss solutions with your IT department.

Workflow does not migrate.  If you build it in Dev or QA environments, you will need to rebuild it on the Production environment.
Workflow designed in SharePoint Designer is not re-usable, it is tied to a specific list.

Try keep subsites to 9 or less.

If you don’t have a Navigation option under Site Actions – Site Settings, it means the Publishing Features have not been activated, get your Administrator to activate them.  You will only see Quick Launch which gives limited editing options.  You will use Navigation just about every day as a Site Owner or Site Collection Administrator.  (Not available on WSS versions).

Subsites aren’t always placed in a logical order, re-order them in Navigation.  (Take item 74 into consideration).

If while you're editing in Navigation and you click save you get a message that says "this site has been modified by another user" and the ID it displays is yours - it means your Quick Launch has become corrupted.  It needs to be fixed in SharePoint Designer, (carefully).

DO NOT edit the default.master page before making a copy of it.  Only edit the copy so you can revert back to the master if you mess it up.

Do not delete placeholders unless you understand implicitly  what they are linked to.  You will break 10 other things on your site.

Creation of content types should form part of the Governance planning and forum to keep control of it.
Make sure you choose the right Parent Content Type the first time.  You cannot change it afterwards.  You will need to delete the whole list and start again.
Make sure you create content types and site columns from the top level site or they will only be available from the subsite and sites below that.

When creating site columns, you could keep them in the Custom Columns group as a start.  That way you won’t confuse your users with many unique groups.  If they are not sure if a column is available, they can look straight in Custom Columns instead of navigating through dozens of groups.  However, the list of custom content types may grow substantially over time and it will become difficult to manage, think about the groups you need to create to manage content types in the long run.  It requires proper planning.

50,000 site collections per content database.
15GB per site collection (default quota max).
50 MB file size limit (recommended) up to 2GB (max).
2000 items per list view.

Don’t just override the 2 month retention period in Central Admin for workflow.  The log files get too big and the task alerts stop going out and 10 other things fall over.  You need to do proper planning on a database level if you need to keep workflow associations on a long term basis. 

Change the regional settings on a server level to your country's specific date format and allow all sites to inherit the settings.

Don’t give end users access to SSP no matter how much they beg - they can destroy half the platform from there.

When task emails stop going out, check the Timer Job Status in Operations on Central Admin first.  Check when last they went out and if it was successful.  If that is where the problem is, stop and start the timer job to reactivate them.  If that is not the issue, check the SMTP server - if it failed at anytime, it would have affected the tasks from SharePoint.

If you are planning on using Excel Services, remember that you need to add the spreadsheets to the Trusted File Locations for each division that requests them.  You need to have a process in place to ensure that the source of these files can be trusted, check with the owners of those systems / locations if we can access their data, as well as a process for business to request a location to be added. (Part of Governance).

Don’t mess with the default settings, for example the out of box functionality is there for business users to leverage.  For example, the default upload limit is 50MB.  If you make that much less, you will affect how long it will take for the business to do bulk uploads from file shares.  It affects the single file limit as well as the multiple file limit.  Training is also done on all the default settings, advise your Governance team if you have changed any of these and be open to changing them back with the right motivation.

Admin Toolkit 4 has some measure of permissions reporting, so that would be greatly beneficial for your end users as they can extract their own reports without bothering IT every 5 minutes. 

Inserting a link on a word to a Site Page (wiki) to another Site Page will take it to the Site Pages library instead of the actual page you wanted.  You need to use the [[ ]] option to insert links to other Site Pages or they won't display.

iFrame HTML code does not display in Site Pages once you click Save and Close.  Bypass this by using the Page Viewer Web Part instead.

If you disable Allow for the Managment of Content Types' on a discussion forum, and you try and view the item, it will disappear and not display.  You Have to have 'Allow for the Management of Content Types enabled in order to view the item and reply to it.  How silly.

You can't import a project plan from MS Project.
You cant re-order items in Project Tasks so get it right the first time.
Can't indent tasks either.

Be careful clicking and dragging items in sync'd SharePoint calendars in Outlook.  If you have Windows XP the item will duplicate a number of times.  If you have Windows 7 though they will move without duplicating. 

You can't use a web part page as a content type.  When you click the New button, the page will open in SharePoint Designer.  This is not ideal if you are building the site for your business users.  Rather paste copies of the page into each library and use those instead.  There is a work-around, but it is complex.