SSI Nav Bar But Page Name Cell A Different Colour?

My website formatting knowledge is mostly HTML; I know hardly any
Javascript. Recently I created a site with a nav bar in table format across
the top of the page, and I made the background colour of the cell with the
name of the page that the reader was on a different shade, like this:

Home | This | That | Other | Etc.

If you were on "Other" page, for example, the background colour of the
"Other" cell was a different shade from the others. I created this by
altering the code on each page.

This site was hosted with a web host that has SSI, and the nav bar became
the same file for every page, so we lost this minor navigation aid. Someone
mentioned that the same effect (a different colour or shade for the cell
with the page name) could be achieved with Javascript, but since I don't
know Javascript and we'd run out of time, we didn't do it.

Now I'd like to have this different colour for the page name cell at another
site using SSI for the nav bar. Is this possible? If so, how? To make it
even more fun, some of the page names are entry points to another section of
the site. If I can make "Other" a different colour, for example, I'd also
like to make pages in the "Other" folder have this same feature so that
readers know that they're in the "Other" section of the site. Or is this too
much?