Use maven-archetype-webapp to start a simple webapp maven project. The command is as follows
mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=[your project's group id] -DartifactId=[your project's artifact id] -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp
This would then create a maven project.
. |-- src | `-- main | `-- java | |-- resources | |-- webapp | | `-- WEB-INF | | `-- web.xml | `-- index.jsp `-- pom.xml