Many people (faculty and students) within the department find it extremely useful to post course information, research information, etc... on the web. The first step in creating a website is to create a public_html directory in your home directory and change the permissions so that everybody can read and, if necessary, execute (not write!!) the files in this directory. You can do this in two commands.
lightning:~ > mkdir public_html lightning:~ > chmod 755 public_hmtl
Now that you have a directory that is readable by the world, you need to add files. If you add the file index.html to this directory with the appropriate permissions, the website www.stat.psu.edu/~username will be the address to this file. Note that the index.html file is the only file that behaves in this way. For example, if you add new_file.html to this directory, the web address will be given as www.stat.psu.edu/~username/new_file.html.
The easiest way to create a webpage is to download the html code from a webpage already created. You can then edit this code using Netscape Composer (or your favorite webpage editor) to suit your needs.