Hello there, Stefanie here with some more ideas for you. I used the same template (Miscellaneous 1) and the same kit (A Happy Family Collaboration by Digital Scrapbook Ingredients and Meghan Mullens) and created three totally different layouts.

Template designers do all of the heavy lifting for you by suggesting where you put everything. Sometimes you want to add an additional photo and make it portrait instead of landscape and so tweaking templates is something I do every time, I seldom use a template exactly as it is. I usually begin with clearing the existing shadow styles, as I love using a set by One Little Bird Designs and this keeps the shadows consistent within my albums.

This layout is quite similar to the template, I clipped papers and photos into their assigned spots and then popped some flowers, greenery and embellishments into their template placements.

For this layout I thought about my own style and moved the paper blocks and photos around so they were more aligned and created a diagonal draw from top left to bottom right. I only added a couple of items more to this layout than the previous one, so pretty much the only differences here are alignment.

Templates can be re-sized or flipped. In the layers palate if you have all of the layers highlighted that you want to move, you can then flip them vertically or horizontally, or decrease the sizes in one easy move. I made all of the parts smaller and then moved them towards the bottom and right of the background paper. Instead of the large photo, I used a trimmed journal card and then added the wordart over the top of the card, where the word family would have been. I do hope that seeing my take on the same template and using the same kit gives you an idea of the versatility of both.