Making the Home page

On my homepage I will have one SWF containing 12 buttons, one for each story.
The buttons are going to animate on hover and then have a get URL action to link to their story HTML pages. I looked on cbeebies again at the buttons they have along the top:

These buttons animate on hover for about a second and a half. There is no down state because as soon as they are clicked they load the page they link to.
There's also a voiceover when they are hovered over that tells children what the button goes to if they can't read the writing.

My buttons will be similar to these but instead of a voiceover I will have a sound effect. Here's my buttons so far:

I'd like to have a big picture of  Bertie's head in the middle with his eyes following the cursor but that might be a bit too ambitious.

The background will probably be an island/beach/ scene.