I'm looking to replicate a website that has this similar characteristics for a portfolio website, showing different works of digital art. For some reason no one I have talked to locally has been able to figure it out. Also, is this all CSS coding? What if I would prefer to do this in flash... I have no clue where to start. http://designforfun.com/portfolio.php click on (client) or (school) and certain ones highlight... again I want this feature for my site but I have NO CLUE!
Well it looks like a bunch of javascript to me. Take a look at the source code and you will see that the title changes depending on which image is moused over. A similar process would be done for the highlighted links as they have all been given a unique class. Javascript is very powerful and people often under use it, it is the scripting language of the web afterall. So to answer your question, no its not css, but javascript, changing background colours of links (<a> tag). Take a look at the scripts in the code, im sure you will find the answers you were looking for
Oxi is right, this is done via javascript. You should be able to disect it and make some changes to it so it will do what you would like.
This is done with YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library), which is fairly complex and you need to have some programming skills to understand it.