Need Help! Probably basic questions

I’m redesigning our website, and I’d like to avoid some issues we had with the other one.
1 The animation seems a little choppy, I believe it’s set at 12 fps

2 When rolling over the submenu, the images seem to take longer than a couple of seconds to load, is this due to finding the file? I have it set up as a blank movie clip and the image files are seperate swf’s that are loaded.

3 I’d like to have the opening page as an html site, which when a button is clicked, loads the new window with the flash website, how do I do that?

Thanks in advance for the help, I’m not really big into web design so I’m trying to get by and know what I need to.
Thanks!