Welcome to the Community, Bryn (and back from the Summit). That was my 6th Summit and they're always a valuable experience.

The Community is an incredible resource for getting help with questions on just about anything including your upcoming Service implementation. I oversee our 35 sites (spread across 17 databases) and we do our own implementations, training, tier 1 support, etc. I'm sure you'll do plenty of testing, but keep in mind that your interface continuously evolves, especially right after you launch it to your public.  

Use feedback from your customers and also your agents to see what improvements can be made and check out the best practices here in the Community for rules, KB publishing, etc. When possible rely on the KISS principle for design and config settings. The application is great for testing new approaches so don't feel you have to rely on the default configurations. For example, we blow up the out-of-the-box workspaces and design our own based on workflow processes that work well for our agents.

Cheers,