How to prepare SSD for initial installation

Hi, bought a Mini Late-2012 with the 1TB HDD with 10.8 I and used Migration Assistant to transfer the contents of

an Imac running 10.8.

I will be removing the stock HDDand installing a 2gb SSD (and put the HDD in an external USB 3 enclosure)

I will want to restore the content of the HDD to the new SSD, or otherwise just do a fresh install of OSX 10.8

and place preferred items now on the HDD, over to the new SSD.

What do I need to do to format the SSD properly and put a clean installation of 10.8 on it and then transfer

or migrate stuff back from the HDD to the new System.

Alternately, when using MA is there a way to not transfer certain elements from the source computer OS - mainly

its existing System files or user files - to eliminate the potential for errors I was having in that (SL) system (glitchiness,

crashes, Finder anomalies, crashes while scrolling long directories of folders/files in a window etc).

THANKS!!!

Mike