Not sure

Hello! I am totally new to WordPress – I have used CMS and news systems before, CuteNews being one of them. However, I hear such great things about WordPress that I want to start using it. Ive gone through the Documentation and its a lot to read lol But still . . . I want to get up to speed with the lingo and how everything works. Im more of a visual person and currently my website server is done so I cant really experiment with anything. But I was wondering what do I need to make this possible:

Click for image
The layout has changed drastically but still the same idea.

Questions
– How would I make it so Categories and Recent Posts appear on the left? And than on all other pages besides the Home page just make it have categories listed?
– For my portfolio link I want it so that when people click on it it does a Javascript accordion script revealing graphics, websites and etc…
– Also for the graphics section I want to have an image gallery, not using Flickr though. Is there any simple uploader that I can have images on and pagination?
– And I want to have a site directory nothing fancy but a thumbnail of the website, the title and a brief description and a link to the website?
– Also when you are viewing a section for example lets say we were looking at About page i want the link on the nav to be white with that red line underneath it.

I know these would be plugins and templates but I was wondering if someone could be kind enough to point me in the right direction and give me links to the plugins or whatever I would need to make this happen. I would greatly appreciate it. Im just having some trouble doing the research on my own.

Thank you!