There is a very good page (written by another user of this forum) with a very nice explanation of this topic (and several other interesting things...).
It starts by showing how one can achieve a "delay effect" without using the delay(), and then it shows how it can be used for more than one elements (even "delays" with different duration for each element).
The page is here:
http://www.thebox.myzen.co.uk/Tutorial/State_Machine.html
I think the important would be that you understand how it works, and then try to write your own code to do exactly what you want.
