You are affecting all of the menu items because you are using a class as a style. To effect menu items individually you need to assign a unique ID to each element. In your case it would be best to wrap a div around each link and give the divs unique IDs so that you can change styles like the back ground not just the style for the links themselves. In your CSS document you can then stylize each div individually and the style will cascade down into its children (your tags).
Example:
<div id="firstMenuItem"><a href... /></div>
CSS
#firstMenuItem {
background-color:#111111;
}
To achieve responding to user events in real time on the web requires the use of JavaScript. Essentially what you want to say in this language is, "when the user mouses over a particular div, change the background color of the menu button."
Since you would like to do the same type of process repetitively with different DOM objects and colors, then you would benefit by writing a function and passing arguments in for the value of the div you would like to change and the color you would like to change it to.
<script type="JavaScript/text">
changeMenuBackground(currentDivID, desiredColor) {
// get the current div element
var div = getElementById(currentDivID);
div.style.backgroundColor = desiredColor;
}
<\script>
There are two moments in the user interaction when the background color of the div needs to change. The first is when the user has the mouseOver the button and the second is when the mouse leaves the button (in us known as mouseOut). To every div that you want to change the background to you would have to change the background to the nw color on mouseOver and on mouseOut.
Example
<div id="firstMenuItem" onmouseover="changeMenuBackground(#firstMenuItem,#333333);" onmouseout="changeMenuBackground(#firstMenuItem,#111111);"><a href="...." /><\div>
There are many different ways to achieve what you want to do, but all of them require the use of JavaScript. This way should do just fine, although you may be able to make it more efficient when tailored to your specific code. Insert the script tags just beneath your CSS styles or CSS sheets but before the body of you page. You must supply the div id preceded by the # symbol and the color you wish to change to for every div in the format i specified above for this function to work.