I have made some further progression with my theme design:

header image added,
search form added under “Navigation” block,
right sidebar added with:

selection of RSS feeds,
recent posts,
most popular posts,
recent comments.

slightly altered design of the footer.

Have a look at it here.

This post has no comments so far.
Click here to view the full post and some additional information.

Whenever I was using a <div>-tag in a post within the richt text editor of WordPress (i.e. for showing php code as in this post), it was replaced by a <p>-tag which was not what I wanted.
Then I stumbled across this fix on the WordPress support forum to correct this odd behaviour - and it [...]

This post has 1 comment so far.
Click here to view the full post and some additional information.

For my own theme - which I am currently designing - I wanted the 5 most recent posts to be displayed in the right sidebar. So I tried to use the query_posts() template tag with the parameter ’showposts=5′.
Well, it worked for the sidebar - the only problem was: now each and every post was shown [...]

This post has no comments so far.
Click here to view the full post and some additional information.