Sharepoint Intranet

We would like to use Sharepoint as our internal intranet. For it to hold the company telephone book and internal communcations. We want to use the out-of-the-box standard features of the SharePoint first. Ideally there would be some simple branding to give it a look and feel that ties to our company brand and that is user friendly. If we like what we are getting then there is the possibilty that we would then start to use Sharepoint for other business requirements.