Andrew,
Firstly, I think I have tinkered with the dog site a little too much and it has lost some of it's 'cuteness' from when I first started.
From a sales / adsense click point of view - it doesn't do that great as it all comes down to getting more traffic and I have a habbit of moving on before something is fully running on gas... Which is why I have decided to work with blogs because I can automate a lot more of it.
The templates all come with the program - when you first create your new project it should ask you which template you want to use or if you want to use a blank one. I haven't got it installed on my PC right now as I have recently formatted my hard drive, so I can't tell you exactly where it is but it's near the beginning before you actually go into design mode.
If you don't want to use a standard one then you can create your own - which I have started to do more of now (I'm no expert!) by using Photoshop.
Kidino has a great site that details how to make your own XSP template for FREE over at this link
here
My adsense conversion is reasonable on some of my sites which I have changed... sorry not putting the links here as they don't look that great! but it appears that putting the 720 banner just under your header on your page gives good results, more than what i was getting before. but still lacks potency due to small amounts of traffic.