Back in school, I used to have a .login file along the lines of

alias ll = ls -l
alias dir = ls -Fhl
alias web = cd ~/public/public_www/development
...

I'd like to do that sort of thing with my XP box here at work, but most of the resources I've found online seem fairly complicated and heavy-duty. Is there a way to do this that doesn't involve mucking about in the registry or running a large batch file?

EDIT: My original reason for asking this was that I only need the command line for one command in one specific folder, and I wanted to be able to get to that folder quickly when I launched the command line. But the accepted answer for this question is so good that I decided to ask about my original issue as a separate question here.