Thank you for the great suggestions.
To help illustrate where we hope to go in the back, let me show you what we've done in the front. We really love the tile we put on the front, but have a really large space out back and think that enlarging our patio and then stampting it with something similar would be better than tiling a huge space.
Here is the front of our house shortly after it was purchased (3 years ago):
The first thing we did was replace the windows, I made a mosaic mailbox and added some landscaping/rock border, we also patched cracks in the porch and waited a year to ensure that it was not settling:
Then we stained the fence:
At this point we tiled the front porch and put in a cedar post:
Next, we made some cedar shutters:
The last step was to replace the front door and storm door, which we did over the holidays this year. This was taken just a few days ago (before we received some significant snow), and shows are new doors: