Separating static web pages from WAR file

I have a web application which is a WAR file. I will be hosting this in Amazon cloud, using Linux and Tomcat. However I now need to create a different UI using HTML and CSS, no Java or WAR. My plan is, user will access this static user interface first and from a link there, they will access the actual java based web application.

There are 2 ways I can do this. First is to put all of this static content into the WAR file. Second is seprating the static content from the WAR file. I prefer the second method, because I can add info to the user interfaces without shutting down the entire web application.

But, how can I do this? How can I put these static files to tomcat and link the WAR file to it? Specially is this is possible in amazon cloud?