It is quite easy to set up web pages on the stat, owlnet or ruf networks: all you need to do is put your web pages under a specified folder. On stat network, this folder is /www/yourusername/public_html; on owlnet or RUF this folder is ~/public_html. It is important to put a file named index.html under these folders since it is the default page, i.e., it is the web page that will be displayed when you type in http://www.stat.rice.edu/~yourusername (or other servers like www.owlnet.rice.edu) in any browser. If there is no index.htm, a set of files and folders will be displayed and someone can browse through the files in your public_html directory. This rule also works for other directories. This is nice if you're working on a project or something and want to post some files for anyone to see and easily get. If you really do not want people to see all files under a folder, you can put an index.html under that folder with a `sorry' message. You can also make the index.html unreadable (chmod o-r index.html) and viewers will get an error message instead.
Since each account is separate (ie stat, owlnet, RUF), you could, in theory, have 3 different web pages on 3 different servers, an owlnet page that people searching for you on the Rice homepage would find, another on the stat network that people browsing the stat homepage would find, and a third on RUF that nobody would find (unless you told them where to look). Some possible uses would be to post a resume on your owlnet web page, information about your areas of interest in statistics on your stat homepage, and a personal page on your RUF account. But it's easy enough to create multiple pages in any one account.
It seems that Microsoft has won the browser war and there is only one web browser: Internet Explorer left. However, IE for Unix is still buggy and you would better use other browsers. There are many other options and mozilla is the best one. Mozilla is installed under /usr/site/mozilla/bin and you can invoke it by its full path name or add this path to your $PATH. Anyway, mozilla can be slow and if your computer is not powerful enough, Netscape is still a better choice. If you are a Unix guru, lynx is a text based browser. There are two situations that you might want to use lynx: you want to convert a web page to a plain text file so that you can view it easily ( as used by pine or mutt), or if you have only a terminal access to stat servers but need to view a web page or download some files.
A caveat about web pages and the Internet - There is no unified webmaster for engineering, Rice in general or statistics. We do not have a real webmaster for the Stat website. E.g., course pages are available on stat website, rice course pages, and professors' websites. (Things are disorganized, and everyone has an opinion) See the section above for information on where/how to host web pages on Rice's network.