side menu Help!

Using Mantra and love it. I became very confident in myself in doing whatever when I opened my big mouth and told my boss I could add a side menu (plain rect buttons with hover color change)to the pages side column. We would have 2 menus then (Main horiz & side vert). Well I created the second menu, adding the items, and the appear as text links. No good. I need buttons or Im loosing my job. I enabled the css classes option in the menus, but I cant get any of the css to work. Help.