How to change the color of the current location in Quick Launch?

Question

I'm very new to SharePoint, so I need y'alls' help. I am desperately trying to change the color of the selected navigation in the Quick Launch. Right now, it is a baby-blueish kinda' color. No problem with this, but it is incredibly close to the color I have selected for the Light 1 theme color (for a Team Site). I believe I have isolated its location to the CSS .ms-quickLaunchheader class, specifically to the background-image property of "url('/_layouts/images/quickLaunchHeader.gif')", which repeats-x. I wish to make it a goldish color with the same kind of gradient feature, which leads me into two questions:

• if I am going to make a similar quicklaunchheader.gif file (except gold) and load it into the same directory as the original, and point the CSS to the new file, will this be a solution? If so, I am unable to actually find said /_layout folder in the Designer or file structure. Any idea where to find it?

• if I can simply change it through a background-color option or color option in its CSS property, of course this would be much easier. Any idea if there is a property to do this?

The image is specifically the feature I am describing; it is the current location of "page one" in the Quick Launch. Sorry for the link, but can't post image because new :)

Thank you for your time.

http://corylangner.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/defaultnav1.png

Answer 1

There's an extra class added to 'selected' menu nodes in the quick launch. That's used to style the current selected node in there. Use FireBug or Internet Explorer Dev Tools to locate it.

The /_layouts folder is in SharePoint Root on the server file system, so you will need a feature to deploy files to that location.

If you want only to change this for a specific site collection, you could put your custom image and CSS into a library, and load the CSS via the masterpage to affect all pages in the site collection.