I do something that may be a little unorthodox when installing Apache. Generally, when building software from source on a *nix environment, I put source in /usr/local/src, then cd to /usr/local, untar the package, compile the source, and "make install" generally puts the executables in the /usr/local/<package> directory. Apache, however, needs a build directory and a
separate install directory. Therefore, I build apache in /usr/local/src/apache-<major-version>.<minor-version>.<release>, and create another apache-<major>.<minor>.<release> in /usr/local. Then, per my typical package installation, I create a sym link from /usr/local/<package> to /usr/local/<package>-<major>.<minor>.<release>.
Example (without including mod_perl or other modules):
cd /usr/local/src
tar -xvzf ./apache_1.3.31.tgz
cd ./apache_1.3.31
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache_1.3.31
make && make test && make install
cd /usr/local
ln -s /usr/local/apache_1.3.31 /usr/local/apache
cd /usr/local/apache
vi ./conf/httpd.conf (make necessary changed to config file)
./bin/apachectl start
If I've confused you, don't worry about it :) Just follow the "recipe" and you'll be fine!