HTML et al

Call it the Architect in me, but the wasted space on the right side of my blog irks me to no end. I've been trying out several templates today and its slowly occurring to me that I might need a crash course in html in order to format it to look the way I want it to. This is a "Proogle" anyway (Product-of Google) so it should have more than just 16 templates for crying out loud. Can anyone help please?