How to get apache virtual hosts working

I have tried following every tutorial I can find and I can’t seem to get the WordPress one click setup to serve files from a different directory besides the default /var/www/html.

I have used a2dissite, a2ensite, reloaded, restarted apache. The properties in the config file ServerName, etc.

One interesting detail is that when I ran a2dissite 000-default.conf came back with an error to the effect that the corresponding file in sites-enabled was not symlinked. Which is weird since creating new .conf files in sites-available does seem to symlink them into sites-enabled. I have setup these files on other droplets and had no problems. Is this something unique to this pre configured droplet?

I scrapped my first droplet - I had deleted all the original default .conf files in frustration and apache was, in my opinion, still using one of them. It was looking for a directory that I had deleted, which though an error, but that directory was not pointed to in any of the configurations that were supposed to be active.

This is my /etc/apache2/sites-available/mydomain.conf file.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin ben@mydomain
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html.old
    ServerName mydomain
    ServerAlias www.mydomain
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

    <Directory /var/www/html.old/>
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

The only way I found to serve something else is to change the contents of /var/www/html. This is not ideal, since my next move is to get multiple sites running with subdomains. As of right now I am getting by but starting to get frustrated with the learning curve.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.