Is it okay to use symbolic links in my web server?
There's nothing wrong with that, as long as the apache process can read the files in your home directory.
If you're on a development machine, you could just as well put your files under the /var/www directory or a subdirectory thereof, but you can also edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default so that the line with DocumentRoot points to your /home/tim/Website/files_here folder.
There's also mod_userdir, an apache module that permits files in /home/<username>/public_html to be served.