Converting to Drupal

I have some specific questions about Drupal as this project I have become embroiled in is leaning in that direction for the front-end. The project is a new pilot, not a migration, but this felt like the most relevant place to post. I'm green to Drupal (green to development in general, more of a designer usually!)

We are building a closed-community information portal regarding security threat reporting. The key requirement is that the back-end is external to the front-end, with no posted data residing in the front-end database.

After building dozens of fairly complex sites by hand (literally Notepad) over the years, I have decided to save what is left of my hair and make the jump to Drupal. So now our testing environment is set up and the default site is "live" locally. Then...the problem. The coder in me downloads the Zen Theme and starts ripping apart the pages and templates, trying to get it to look like our existing sites...but I know that's wrong (right?). I'm adding images, writing custom css, and moving things around the the page.tpl.php file and thinking to myself, "This is wrong. Drupal is more than a user-management and blog posting system. I chose not to use Wordpress for a reason...but why?"

My question: Where do I start to get off on the right foot from a design standpoint? I'm used to building custom sites from a blank slate. Experienced users: Please help. Newbies (like me): Follow me on a series of questions that I can't seem to find answers to.

CSS Image Rollover Menu

I would create an image for the menu (for example), add a bulleted list to the PHP page, and then style the list to overlay my image rollover CSS menu. In Drupal, should I hand-code that in to the page.tpl.php or code it into a header box?

What Is a Menu?

I am currently looking at using either the Taxonomy or CCK module on my Drupal site as a means to create a hierarchical system. However, I'm a little confused on which one would best suit my needs, or if there is something else that would work better.

I've been assigned the task of moving a rather large HTML site to Drupal and the navigation is fairly complex.

Conversion of the old web site to Drupal is coming along just fine: an event list that never gets stale (eliminating events that already occurred); taxonomy terms to organize the site; a Google Map without GMap - just code; a block presenting a randomly selected quote; even random video clips.

But now I'm stuck. I want to invite members of the community to add pages, but I'd like to assign each authorized individual (via Profiles?) to a single taxonomy term: "only update those pages." Is such a thing possible?

I run and maintain a church site, http://www.holytrinity-madeira.org, using Dreamweaver and hand coding, but it does mean that I am the only one who can add anything to it. As it needs a bit of a revamp I decided to look into CMS, after a couple of false starts I have settled on Drupal.

Hi,

Our company has a business site that is written in native PHP. I need to migrate the whole site to Dupal. I already made a custom Drupal theme and the look of the site is almost done.
However, I have some problems.