As you have discovered, the basis for any web page or site is content. How you communicate the content can bring visitors to your web site. A web part is the basic building block of communication in SharePoint 2010. Once you have decided how information is to be structured, a web part is powerful weapon in your communcations arsenal. For instance, displaying news from the dean's office or a professional organization can be acheived with an RSS feed. What if you wanted to display tuition rates that are updated in an Access table? It is simple to do using the list view web part. See the web part tutorials for more information on web parts and how to implement.
Whether you are collecting reservations for an event or conducting a survey, check out the custom features built into forms. Forms are complicated to build and now you can have data at your fingertips with the forms features offered in SharePoint 2010. For more information, visit the Create Survey section.
As you start building out your site, don't overlook the power of reusable content. If you have content--maybe an information or contact box--to list on more than one page, consider the magic of reusable content functionality in SharePoint 2010. For instance, if you build the contact box and store it in the reusable content library, you and others can add the content to your page. Then when changes are made to the content in the library, every instance of that content is updated throughout the web site. Just think of how this feature can save you many a worry about updates.
Having the content on the site, as said before, is really important. But there is no reason content can't look good, too. Instead of listing paragraph after paragraph down a page, consider arranging the text horizontally by using a tabbed layout. Or even listing the text in an accordion so that the visitor has control over the content and can choose only the topics needed. Using an accordion or tabbed page layout is explained in the content formats section.