Do you think that the design of your blog is important? There are bloggers who barely change anything after choosing a template that they found on some website. You can easily recognize such blogs as they usually do not differ from one another. As a matter of fact, most of them look very alike. In my opinion, they are also the easiest to navigate. I have seen a lot of templates of this type, and they are the most straightforward that I have seen. On the other hand, there are those who claim that originality is the key to success. They choose the most complex graphics for their blog, and they want to be the only ones that have a blog that looks very original. They spend hours upon hours customizing the default version of their template in order to make it as unique as possible. They create beautiful custom images in Photoshop, and implement them on their site so that no one else in the world will be able to have a similar design. They often upgrade their blog with new graphical elements.
Nonetheless, the question still remains whether working a lot on a template is really that beneficial. Are the readers of such a blog going to appreciate it? Are ads going to generate a bigger income? Is this blog attracting more visitors than a blog that uses a basic template? I believe that changes to templates are important; however, a blogger should not be obsessed about it.