What does my blog look like?

Sorting out the appearance questions for a teacher blog opens up a whole world of questions. My concern is that my blog needs to include a range of elements so that other teachers and, significantly, MY STUDENTS who visit my blog, will get an impression of my own comfort zone with regard to manipulating widgets etc. Some of my favourite teacher bloggers include specific elements that are quite common across teacher blogs. So there are those sorts of elements to find out how to include.
The other sorts of widgets are those that tell the reader something about the individual teacher - like Librarian blogs that include the Shelfari widget, or teachers who are also photographers who include a feed from flickr.
There is also the monitoring of visitors widgets e.g. Clustrmaps... and deciding if these are useful or just indicators that NO ONE IS VISITING!
So I decided to dive in and find out how to incorporate Clustrmaps. Turned out to be pretty easy - just go to their website clustrmaps and enter in the url for your blog and your email address, and the HTML code will be generated for the link to your map. Now, the method for creating the gadget (in Blogger.com terms) or widget that is generated by html is different across the platforms... here in Blogger you copy the code into the html gadget on the BASIC LIST... but once you have sorted it out the first time, then there are all manner of gadgets/widgets to have a play with!
So then all I had to do is decide... how many gadgets/widgets is TOO MANY?