Practicing with Chapter 8

There is still a jumble in my head. I'm going by the Creating Web Sites text now rather than the Kompzer tutorial. I created a table and a corresponding style sheet. At first I named the html part tablepractice.html and the css part tablepractice.css. I put them both in the public folder in SSH. By the way, I think I pointed to the style sheet by puting a link tag in the html part.

I deleted everything in the public folder so that I could see if this would look right on the website.
Well, it didn't. The style sheet properties weren't there. So, I thought, "Well, maybe you just have to name it index.html and index.css." I did that. It still didn't take. But in doing that, I accidentally got rid of the main page I had been working on, so I guess I have to start over.

I guess I want to know how I can do these little practice exercises with style sheets and see the results without messing with the website I'm working on. I'm under the impression that I can only test them by putting both the style sheet and the html sheet that points to it in the public folder in SSH.

There may be a very easy answer to this. I am exposing my struggle and lack of understanding, but, oh well.