I'll post my partial answer here - it will hopefully benefit somebody in the future.
In the end it was pretty easy:
- go to the Sharing panel in System Preferences, click on the Edit button by the first Computer Name edit box and then change the Local Hostname to something short, nice and readable (like for example web.local)
- click on the WiFi icon on you'r Mac's status bar menu and select Create Network... on the bottom of the menu, give your new WiFi network a name (+ other option if you'd like) and click create
- don't forget to fire-up MAMP (or any other server you might be using)
- and voila - you can now see the new WiFi network from your iOS/Mac devices, connect to it and use the previously created address (i.e. http://web.local) to access your MAMP server (my mistake previously was that I wanted to take the harder/universal way with local DHCP/DNS servers and IP addresses - but this is much easier and the OSX does everything for you)
Its unfortunately partial because it works only with Apple's Mac/iOS devices - other devices (have tried it with Android) will simply not see the personal network you've created (I assume details are being transmitted via Apple's Bonjour anyway so thats why). But better something than nothing.
But its still pretty cool - I can now connect my iPhone and iPad to the MAMP running on my Mac even without being connected to the Internet or having a DHCP-enabled AP taking care of the networking details.