Blog issues

For those of you who know more than I do...can you help me?
~Why do "Cutest blog on the block" templates not work for my blog? I've seen others of you use them. Did you follow the instructions and "boom" it transformed? I copied the code and everything and it didn't work!
~How do I change the title font without changing the font of the entire blog/how do I change the body font without changing the title font?
~How can I remove the over-large date at the beginning of my posts and stick it at the end instead?
~(If there is no way to tweak these using the graphical interface, can any of you read/write HTML?)
~Is there a way to get more fonts than the 8 that come with the basic blog?
~Can I make smileys instead of using this :-)? If so, how?
I monkeyed with the settings for awhile with no luck (except I did figure out how to make Blogger categorize my posts by tags instead of date: hooray!), then decided to ask those more knowledgeable than myself :-). Thanks!