I just solved a problem that I gave up upon once - I tried again and succeeded at last. Such things feel great :-)
So maybe the combination of words I use here will help others to google the solution quicker.

When you set up an Apache Webserver, you might want to develop your files somewhere else, say, somewhere in your user directory (Apache normally resides in some system directory and it's not convenient to go there for development).

You'll soon find out that you need to make two changes to httpd.conf:
Change DocumentRoot to your home directory and change the corresponding <Directory "...path..."> entry to the same path. Then restart Apache.

Now when you browse your home directory, you might get an error, telling you that you don't have the permission to see anything there.

I spent a long time reading forum posts in the internet and fiddling around with the permissions of that DocumentRoot folder I wnated to use and its contents.
I used chmod to change the permission settings - no success.
I used chown to change the user and group who own the folder and its contents to 'www' (the default within httpd.conf) - no success. (By the way, always use the -R option, so you'll change all the content's ownership in that folder recursively)

Then I read this post that dealed with something different, but reading to the bottom was worthwile:
The whole path to your DocumentRoot folder must be accessible by the Group (and User) specified in httpd.conf. (I guess this holds when DocumentRoot is not within the Apache home directory)
So I changed the Group and User in httpd.conf to 'nic' (which is me on my local machine and I own the whole path to that directory), resetted all the ownerships on my development folder to 'nic' and it worked!

Note: Of course no one would want to do this in a production environment! This is just for testing on your local machine.