yasserstein 0 Newbie Poster

hello,
i'm having many web pages built on a certain master page that has something like a menu with buttons to direct to different pages from it. now i have two questions:
1. i noticed in many websites that the master page stays put having the content pages only loaded - i guess using AJAX technology. how can i do this?
2. i need to interact with the master page from within the content page so that i can set the button leading to this page to a certain color as inactive, and make it not clickable.
any ideas?
thanks.
yasser.