Reddit mentions of Drupal's Building Blocks: Quickly Building Web Sites with CCK, Views, and Panels

The biggest piece of advice I can give is that you consider how many people will be using the site. How many logged in users you expect is going to have a tremendous effect on the amount of resources the website requires. I've run into several clients that were simply unprepared for this, because they had an old static website or one that might as well have been static in comparison to Drupal. This factors significantly into the costs of hosting the website even assuming technical issues are handled.

Some of my clients were paying $4.95 for hosting. You won't host a Drupal site on that. You won't host a Drupal site on shared hosting in general (though there are exceptions) especially not one that users actually log in to.

Also even though Drupal is great because it allows clients to add content to the site, how and where is usually quite confusing. The difference between a Node and a View (being a collection of nodes) is also very confusing. I say this because you should not downplay the time investment in training the clients how to use the site and to a lesser extent Drupal. Make no mistake, you will be making that investment with them, and clients always want to make the sites more complex than they need to be as well which does not help.

After considering performance / resource requirements, I'd probably start by finding a theme that you like that is close to what you want to use. The less you need to modify the better in this case.

I've had good luck implementing menus like the one you described with Superfish in the past. You make a "Menu", then you go to the "Blocks" section and find "Superfish1" and attach that menu as the source for the Superfish block, then place that block where you want it (left sidebar in this case).

Themes have a logo so you can simply upload that. The footer can be done as a block and placed in the footer. A block will also take care of the donation button.

As for what appears on the front page, I usually create a views page, set that to be the home page for the site, then set the view up to show only the content that I want it to show. This prevents clients from doing odd things like promoting random shit to the front page.

TLDR: Pick a theme, learn about blocks / regions, create a "Menu" and play with Superfish.

EDIT:

http://www.amazon.com/Drupals-Building-Blocks-Quickly-Panels/dp/0321591313

Recommend this book. Its Drupal 6 specific, but I'd say 80% of it transfers over to Drupal 7 nicely. Earl Miles (the writer) is the one who wrote Views, Panels, and Ctools all of which are a big part of either version of Drupal.

As the other person posted, there is one hell of a learning curve.