I find myself deriving this from first principals when I setup a new webserver, so I'm going to blog it so I don't forget. This is how I setup a RedHat user account on a new webserver:
useradd admin -G apache chgrp -R apache /var/www chmod -R g+rw /var/www chmod g+s /var/www ln -s /var/www/html ~admin/www passwd admin