Eric,

A phtml file is (for your purpose) a standard html file.
If you do not have an index.phtml file in your userdirectory, you will receive an error (as you have experienced), as the system has been instructed _not_ to show you a directory-listing.

The minimal html page you must create has an html opening tag followed by a header opening and closing tag, and a body opening and closing tag and terminates with an html closing tag.

Check the source of any HTML-page, they all (should) have these tags. Any text between body-tags will be displayed.

For further info, see any web-site on web-authoring and html=-tags.

The fact that this server needs a phtml index, is probably due to the fact that all of the pages are made by PHP-server-scripts.

Anyway, just remember a phtml is just another html page (at least as far as user-pages are concerned)...

Regards
Patrick