Changing permissions caused my site to disappear!

I was trying to upload some photographs and kept getting the message Unable to create directory – wp-content/uploads/2008/03- Is its parent directory writable by the server?

So I went in and changed the permissions for (WP – content) to include group write permissions.

Now my ftp shows that there are no permissions nor will it let me add them. When I Look at the index file for wp-content it says invalid file name. It’s almost like the file no longer exist – it shows it’s there but when I try to open anything I get Stat failed for …… And my blogs URL now shows a white screen.

It’s a new blog with no content so I could just as well start from scratch but I prefer to come to terms with the problem – I would hate to run into when it does matter.