Use customized blog templates or not?

Before I kicked off E-Business 101 at blogspot, I benchmarked several blogspot blogs on a random basis. As I noticed, none of them used the pre-installed templates. On the contrary, they chose to use those customized templates, which basically have the following features:

• have more columns 
• have more ad places
• the template style matches their blog subject better

The end goal, needless to say, is hoping to get a larger return from blogging.

Does it really work as they thought? In many famous webmaster forums, I saw a lot of guys told us that their customized templates worked out quite well and they earned quite a lot from their well designed blogs. Well, personally believe them, for two reasons. First,their decent return is there for everyone to see. Second, I have no data at hand to do any comparison. However,more scrutiny won't do you any harm. To help you make a better decision before your decide to switch to customized template, knowing the demerits of customized templates is also very important. I've summaried the following demerits that currently come to mind:

• More workload. You could no longer take advantage of the drag-and-drop feature when you want to add/delete/modify the layout or widgets. Of course, you could find a way to achieve the same layout effect, but the efforts would propably double.
• Less compatibility. That means, whenever Google put forward a trendy feature in future, adjusting your customized template is time-consuming, whereas those who use the default template could easily enjoy the feature with just one click.
• Degraded performance. You have to use some third-party image host for all the images used in your customized pic. Although you have a wide choice regarding to which host to use, the loading speed of your blog is certain to be impacted.
• A greater tendency to over-monetize your blog. With the flexibility of the customized template, many guys tend to over-monetize their blogs. When we open their blogs, we could see ads floating in almost every corner, in and out of their posts. Yes, such density of ads placement will surely get you additional clicks because of careless clicks according to probability theory. However, in the long term, it will damage your blog's reputation and deter new visitors who are so scared by your ads that swear never to return in future.

Writing this post doesn't follow that I don't suggest using the customized blog template for your blog. I just want to encourage you to think more before you decide to switching blog templates. If the benefits it will bring clearly outweigh the negative effects based on a thorough analysis of your situation, go ahead. If otherwise, keep with the default template.