Theme development

I would like to replace the navigation menu. Instead of having a block down the left side of the page I would like to have them in a horizontal line on a navbar. Any ideas on the way to do this?

I do not want to use the primary links, it does not appear to be able to have child links.

My goal is to have a navbar and a sub-nav bar. Like this;

What would be the easiest way to do this.

Thanks
Marty

I use phptemplate engine.

I use a self developed module which issues a drupal_set_html_head to include a few JS scripts. However, this information is not displayed by the <?php echo $head; ?> call, but if I use

echo drupal_get_html_head();

it works. This is most strange, because phptemplate itself uses drupal_get_html_head() to give a value to $head.

This is my current theme: http://sparque.info/

What I want is this: http://sparque.info/nice/

Could someone troubleshoot my first design, or tell me which theme engine is easy for a n00b: phptemplate, smarty, xtemplate, or the regular themes (.theme)?

Here is the source for my design (in a txt file for easy downloading):
http://sparque.info/nice/spq.txt

Could someone help me to change a Xtemplate theme to display the Taxonomy description, please? I don't have a clue where to start and the included readme of this module gives no further information.

The Kubrick theme for Drupal has been quite usable for peoples. Now I am looking at converting 2 more GPL designs to Drupal. They are Manji and Persian. The first one, in particular, is very good and stylable. I think these two will make good themes for a drupal-based personal blog. (which I think none of the available themes is really suitable for)

Hello. I'd like to break up my front page so that it will display the 5 most recent stories grouped by taxonomy. In other words, I'd like to display the last 5 stories of say "politics", and then beneath that, I'd like to display the last 5 stories of "editorials", etc. I'm moving over from Movable Type, and this used to be very easy to do in that system by specifying "lastn" and "category". However, I'm completely unfamiliar with Xtemplate. Any help will be greatly appreciated.