Absolute recursive tar without parent directories?

Jake Wilson asked:

I have a directory structure that looks something like this:

/var/www/website/index.php
/var/www/website/home.php
/var/www/website/whatever.text
/var/www/website/.htaccess
/var/www/website/images/
/var/www/website/images/image1.jpg
/var/www/website/images/image2.jpg

I want to tar the website directory recursively, but I don’t want to include the parent structure. If I do this:

tar -zcvf /tmp/mytar.tar.gz /var/www/website/*

Then all the files have the entire /var/www/website/ parent structure in the tar file. The only way I can do what I want is to:

cd /var/www/website
tar -zcvf /tmp/mytar.tar.gz *

That way, there is no parent directory structure in the tar file.

Is it possible accomplish what I need without having to cd into the directory first?