Flash is pretty hard for first timers I would say. I think you need to have a logical way of thinking to really grasp the Flash methods.
I have made some websites using Flash. They're nothing special, have no special effects, I kinda got lazy. But I'm thinking of redoing one of them....then again...the key word is..."thinking" LoL. I'm trying to beef up my imaging and flash skills before I go full out with the redoing of the website. I'd be glad to help you along your way. I'm pretty familiarized with Flash and "ActionScript". If you know HTML, you can say that AS is the HTML of Flash.
I made my websites on whatever, sometimes it had no theme. I just used it as a practice I guess you could say. And to get a lot of traffic you need to banneritize everywhere, LoL.
Just start building and new ideas come to you.
Here are some places for Flash Tutorials...
Flash4All.De Macromedia.Com FlashWorker.De
Two of these websites are in German, but they have some English on them. If you like I can translate for you. The one German website has downloaded .fla files so you can see how they work instead of trying to do it yourself.
If you don't like those websites I'm sure there are lots out there

. Just go to Google.Com and you can find almost anything.
I hope this helped a little. Let me know if I can help you any further or with something else

.
Good Luck,
FireWolf