Character Creation
It's widely accepted that CoH has the best character generation engine of any MMO. Use it to make the perfect character to suit your personality and playstyle.
Spend some time thinking about what kind of character you want to play. I've noticed that many people have a great fondness for their first characters while others are Altoholics. Either way, the attachment and fun that people have in CoH is often directly related to how much effort is put in to the character's design and story.
Right now, you can plan everything out about your character except for their exact look because the character creation engine is not available until your account is active.
The Devs have been harassed for a long time by myself and others to allow the character generation function to be accessed before activating an account. Their reason (as I understand) for not doing this is because people will make characters that look like copyrighted characters. Well, they either will or won't and having an active account or not has no bearing on it.
First of all, people who have never played are typically reeled in by the character generator. It's how I became interested and it's how I got a friend interested. Secondly, people like me who have played before get really excited about starting up again because of a character design I thought of. Being able to fully build that character offline would give me great encouragement to reactivate.
Anyway, that's what they decided and while I completely disagree with that decision, out of respect, I will not link to the "city of heroes korean character creator" which can be easily googled, downloaded, modded to use the menus in English, and then used to plan out characters to your hearts content (did I write that out-loud?)
The normal method versus a "theme"
Typically, character generation goes from server selection to origin, archetype, powers, character design, story/name/battle cry, and starting city. However, there's no such thing as an order to creating a hero. Some start by picking the powers. Others by the sex. Still others think of a great name and build a theme entirely around that. The key to making a character that you will enjoy playing and showing off to others is to put some time and effort into it.