Website load testing with JMeter

I needed a tool to load test a website I was working on that I knew was going to have a large amount of traffic. In the past I used Apache Benchmark, but I needed a little bit more extensive load testing plan. I found JMeter to be great solution that is quite powerful and extensible, although it has somewhat of a learning curve. I followed the basic directions in the JMeter documentation and created a basic load test for X number of simultaneous connections.