how would you structure this?

[valeria_vi]

ok,
this is my first time ever doing anything with server-side stuff.

the navigation for the site is divided into 5 main categories which have sub-links in them. Clicking on the main category will display the sub-links. the idea is to display teh current category and sub-category in a different color. I could potentially acomplish this with javascript, buti think that in this situation, having it come from a db will be a better approach.

so my idea was that each link will carry some parameters with it and then i will perform a check and say

if ((category == passed category) && (sub-link = passed sub-link)) {
  display in red
}
else {
  display in blue
}

or something like that.
so how do you think i should be organizing this?
1. each main category is its own table, with sub-links as rows
2. everything is in 1 table and each row will have the sub-link and the main category it belongs to (but then i'd still have to have a separate table to hold all of the main categorie, right?)
3. some other better solution.

could you please tell me what the advantages/drawbacks of each solution are? this is the first time i'm trying to "design" a db, so i have no clue.
thanks!

[jofa]

3) All categories in one table, each row having the category name and other properties and also the parent category id, if it's a main category, then parent is null

Storing Hierarchical Data in a Database

[jofa]

Answer to the "display in different colours" question:
First of all; use css to define the style (colour etc), then you can set different class names (e.g. "active"/"inactive") for the html elements
If you use a recursive function to print out the links, then it's very easy to send a parameter to that function to make all children (and grandchildren etc) to a certain category "inherit" the same style