im hosting my own website. i can get to it though the ip address like u sayed in the tutorial what i would like to be able to do is make i where you can type a .com name instead of the ip address Ex. www.bigdogrealtors.com.

First you need to register your domain from a registrar. Patheticcockroach.com is registered by 1steuro. Godaddy is a more famous registrar, but you need to give away your credit card number so I didn't test them. There is also Dolster. You shouldn't pay more than 15$/year for a .com domain name.

Then you should set up a redirection to your IP. Note that only some registrars offer this redirection. In the case of 1steuro, I think you need to pay like 1 more euro per year for the forwarding. The only problem with the forwarding is that your visitors will still see your IP at some point, there is a way to avoid this but this implies setting up a DNS server which I don't know how to do.

If you don't want to pay for a domain name, you can use no-ip.com to set up a redirection like this one : http://mpam.myftp.biz:8081/phpbttracker/

i realy dont care if they can see my ip address or if they have to use it to get to my web site this is because im making a website for a compatition. after going through and doing some research on my own and getting to better understand the configuration of a server i think that in this part

search for DirectoryIndex : this is the name of the index file that Apache will serve if asked for a directory. We set it to DirectoryIndex index.php index.htm index.html index.html.var

apache searchs for a page named index if if there is one then it redirect you to that page if im right then i could add for instance home.html and if there was suck a file then it would redirect me if im wrong let me know

This is correct. You shouldn't however add too many names on this line because :
1. it may become quite confusing for you
2. if you ever want to upload your website on a rented server, home.html won't be in this line so you'll have to edit the server configuration again or, if you can't, rename home.html to index.html
I'm not saying that it won't work. It will, but it may give you a bit more work.