user permissions

[eoghan]

Hi
I have a user that I use for doing the odd bit of work on my  
freebsd-6.1-RELEASE machine.
I wanted to set apache to work from:
/home/user/public_html/
instead of the default location. I can create these folders no  
problems but i have to do it as root:
mkdir /home/user/public_html/
How do I ensure my user can copy files from gui (gnome) to this  
folder. Im told I dont have permission to copy to this folder.
Also apache tells me I dont have permission when I change the  
DocumentRoot to point to /home/user/public_html/
Just not sure how to go about giving a user permissions on files/ 
folders I want them to be able to edit. Any pointers?
Thanks
Eoghan