Changing the web log appearance and elements
Under Manage Settings > Template there are a range of ready-made page styles to choose from. Within some templates there are further colour schemes available. Every part of your page is editable but often one of the standard templates will work best.
Layout takes you to aarea where the elements of your page can be dragged around to different positions.
Add a Page Element opens a panel of content you can include. the useful simple ones are List, Link List, Text. Feed and HTML/JavaScript can be effective additions for those who know what they're doing. Once included, any of the new panels can be re-positioned.
Before leaving the web log go to Settings. Under Publishing you'll see the url for your web log. make a note of it if you haven't already.
Restricting or widening access to your web log
There is a facility to nominate other people who can then contribute to and edit your posts. Alternatively you can restrict who can read it in the first place. Under Settings > Permissions you can see the options and it's fairly easy to see what to do. To add other people who can post click on Add Authors. Restricting access may be useful for something like meeting minutes or confidential exchange of views through posts. A more useful option might be to be able to restrict access to certain posts but I haven't figured out how to do that yet.
Colour scheme changes
This new version really does make it easier to change the fonts, colours, styles of virtually every section, customisation at levels that previously was for CSS code specialists only. In fact, careful choice and positioning of Elements and use of this customisation facility can enable users to create quite distinct and unique variations on the original templates. Indeed, if it were not for the sadly continuing lack of control over the order of posts (other than by fiddling the publish dates) Google's Blogger Beta almost provides something close to simple web site capabilities. Presumably they stopped at that point to ensure we didn't ditch their Google Pages web site alternative offering!