When you start building a Website, you first set up a folder, usually referred to as the local folder, on your computer. This folder ultimately contains an exact copy of the finished Web site that will be located in the root folder on your Web server. When you are ready to upload your site to your Web server, you use an FTP client to move the contents of the local folder, but not the folder itself, into the root directory on the Web server.

The root directory is the one to which the root URL for your Web site points. A URL provides a unique address for every document on the Internet.

Every domain, such as eduardosphotography.com, is associated via the Domain Name System (DNS, a kind of phone book for the Web) with an IP address (Internet Protocol address, the unique numerical name of every server on the Internet). When you type a URL in your browser, the DNS looks up the domain name, finds the IP address of the associated server, and forwards the request to that server.

When the server receives the request for the page, it uses the domain name associated with the request to route the request to a specific folder on the server that relates to that domain: the root folder. If the URL contains a path directly to a specific page, that page is served to the requesting Web browser. If the requested URL is simply "www.eduardosphotography.com", with no file name specified, the root folder is searched, and if it contains a page called default.html (or htm), home.html, or index.html, that page is automatically served.

In short, the root folder is the top folder in the hierarchy of your Web site, and thanks to yor ISP or network administrator, it is associated with your Web address. Learn more about the DNS system on the InterNIC site (www.Internic.net/faqs/authoritative-dns.html).

I think the structural and presentational aspects of the design can develop together, but when coding begins, the structure has to lead, as it's the framework on which the presentation hangs. So it's fine, to have a visual design in front of yu as you start to code. Often, I will take a printout of the page design, and start drawing the boxes that represent divs around the elements, grouping related areas of content together. I will give each of those boxes a name that I will later use as a div ID. If you do this, you can treat those boxes as the basis of your wireframe, then you can lead with the structure and let the visual design be added in as you develop the page's markup.