Sole Proprietor or LLC for 1-man Website design?

Anything like this I would consult a lawyer. Make a little money on the side while you can (make sure you pay the tax man though). A lawyer will be able to give you much better answer based on your exact needs and your location(which can make a difference).

Depends where you are based as registering as a sole proprietor or an LLC have different benefits and pitfalls depending on what country you live in. For example, where I live I am registered as a sole trader because, god forbid, things don't workout, I can easily fold the business with little consequence going forward. If it is just you then I can't see too many benefits to the LLC route but, again, thats from my perspective where I live. I would contact a lawyer/accountant who would be best placed to advise you going forward.

A lawyer will be able to give you much better answer based on your exact needs and your location(which can make a difference).

A big for this advice

I would also talk to an accountant.

Lawyer will tell you the legal ups/downs... an accountant will give you the tax ups/downs.

Either way, both of them will help you get set-up correctly and should help you make expensive and time-consuming mistakes.

ALSO -- Ditto what @Charles said. You'll need a portfolio of work before a business is willing to pay and/or trust you... and doing "free/cheap" work, while it sounds like a win-win, usually leads to cheapskates bossing you around and not valuing your time and tech skills.

Go through Treehouse, learn the lessons, build yourself a blog/portfolio site and start building an audience (don't forget to get an email list - mailchimp has a free option). Use your blog posts & portfolio to showcase what you're working on, and what you have learned about web design.

In addition to your own site, make-up a few excuses to do another personal site, dig up some web work -maybe for a friend's band, or maybe volunteer a simple site for a good cause... just make sure you set clear boundaries up-front. - You can also try to find a graphic designer in need of an apprentice, or find a short internship.

Finding clients can be hard, and there is a VERY SHARP learning curve to freelancing and managing web projects. It's a lot of work and can be very difficult.

(that was probably the exact OPPOSITE thing you wanted to hear... but trust me. Get a gig working for someone, partner with someone more experienced, or if you must fly solo, and without experience, take it slow and be smart.)

For the record, I'm in the US and have an LLC. Talk to your tax/law pros first. Generally accepted wisdom is to have an entity that reduces liability... but you're probably looking at $800-$1500 to get set-up with a Lawyer filing your stuff + another few hundred for an accountant/bookkeeper. -- all VERY WELL worth the money.

Thanks for all the advice. As for getting to the point of being marketable, I plan on doing three and only three free websites.

The first will be for a non-profit organization where I once interned (doing IT). Looking back I wish I new about Team Treehouse and would have talked the non-profit company into paying for my monthly Team Treehouse membership. :)

Number 2 will be my own personal website (now-blank, will become a portfolio over the next few weeks).

Number 3 will be my parents' website--which right now looks like a step back in time to 1999. I won't do this one until I'm more well versed on back-end development, since it needs to be shopping cart & PayPal/credit card capable. Not sure if I'll stick around to learn Ruby on Rails or perhaps learn Drupal instead, but that's another discussion post for a later date.

As for the original question, I'm in Hawaii and still about 4 semesters away from the graduate degree. So web design won't be first priority for many more months. Sole proprietor for now, and see what direction my 3 showcase websites takes me for the LLC idea.

sounds like you have a plan!

(I don't know what kind of business stuff your parents do, but I will tell you this: There's a lot of serious security stuff you need to know about before messing with shopping cart stuff. You can try learning Rails or Drupal... But honestly - for now, I'd learn Wordpress.

Check out Woo Commerce and Jigoshop (both free with paid and free extensions). Get the html/css under your belt. Start tinkering with JS and some lite php... you can easily build a custom WP theme... which means you have the experience of php experts doing the core of the site, while you can concentrate on the theme and maybe using some php/js knowledge to enhance some UI/UX and Functionality. There's a pretty big WP market. (if that helps your direction)

My advice is to not worry about that right now. Dive into the lessons and work your butt off. See if you like it as a hobby first and work your way into making a little money on jobs. If you stick with it, thoroughly research all of your options on business structure, and the choices will become much more clear.

Make sure you want to do this everyday! If you wake up and find yourself dreading learning new code, this isn't right for you.