Actions list weird, can't find basic things.

Question

Hello,
[Quick intro: This is my first time on the site so hello! My name is Jason, I'm an artist, graphic designer, and animator, and I use most Adobe products in creating my artwork and videos.]
So, here is my problem. I used to use drag and drop stuff to create websites and just recently got into using Flash and Dreamweaver. I am using the CS3 versions of both of these programs. What I'm trying to do now is make an animated button that's also a link to another page on my site. I was able to make the button in Flash with an up state, animated over state, down, hit and all. My problems are as follows:
1. It's a link on my index page and I'm trying to make it link to my main page where there's the menu and links to the rest of the site... but I don't know how to make the button a clickable link. I've searched for tutorials and guides online, and it seems I have to do a getURL action on it, but I'm not sure that I'm doing it right (I'm copy and pasting examples and switching in my own link): it ends up looking like this:
on(release)
getURL("http://www.example.com", "_blank");
I'm not familiar with the code, but it seems simple enough. Anyway, I'm trying this with just basic links to standard websites, and I can't seem to get it to work.
2. A major problem I have is with creating the actions themselves. My menu for selecting the actions is weird; I see on all these tutorials that there's are menus that you can select it like this:
Though, my menu for actions looks like this:
Tons and tons of fl.something things... I can't find any of these getURL menus, or anything like that.
So, am I going about making this animated button a link correctly? Is there an easier way to do it? Is there some easier way to do it in Dreamweaver after I've already created the button? Also, one last little question. When I have the button done, should it be saved as a .fla file? Or exported as a .swf file?
Sorry for bombarding everyone with questions in my first post, but I've been at this for hours and hours and I feel like I'm going in circles looking at these tutorials and guides.
Thanks so much!
Jason

Answer 1

I tried again, making sure that actionscript 2.0 was selected (though, when I went to the menu it already was). Here's what I have: I just drew a simple black box for the button just to test (Up, down, over and hit area all the same). So I put that in the stage, and put the action on it as you can see at the bottom. On the right in the pic is the settings in publish settings. (Action script 2.0 is selected).