Normally you will want to develop on your local machine, rather than uploading to your server all the time while developing. You can check out WampServer or XAMPP for starteres. The latter is available cross-platform, while WAMP is Windows only. Using your local server, you should be able to use the yiic console application as described. Once you’ve finished developing, only then you would normally upload the completed website to your web hosters.
If you can’t or don’t want to use yiic, you may be able to start a project by copying the webapp folder framework/cli/views folder. This folder contains the files needed for a base project. Make sure to update the index.php file of your copied webapp folder. The $yii variable will need to be updated to point to the correct path.
The complete site is made up by the folder that yiic created as well as the Yii ‘framework’ folder. The framework folder contains all the behind-the-scenes code for your website. You do not need the ‘demo’ and ‘requirements’ folders that are also included in the Yii download.