Okay, so I've been playing with the idea of opening my own web design business.

First, I'd like to know if anyone here owns their own business, and what kind of business it is. What kind of legalities are involved?

Secondly, I want to plug my newest website,The Vaults of Chaos. It's a submission based site, so I need some submissions, folks. Right now submission is by email, but I'm working on a form for them.

Can't see anythign wrong with starting your own business. I am not sure how you'd go about setting one up in the states, but hey it is worth looking into.

Keep an eye out for the government trying to fleece you pockets at every turn.
My first business died cause I didn't do my research on tax evasion and what can happen when they bust you doing it.
My second business will be wrapping up as soon as my stock runs out. I've done everything by the book, which means hands to the wall while we take as much as we can from you.
Every move is yet another tax, copywrite lawsuit, dangerous chemical regulation payment, import duty or transport fee. Just when you think they have squeezed enough out of you, they think up another one. And all this was just for importing cosmetics from the US.

I don't think I have to worry too much about chemical regulations in the web design business. But, yeah, that's the kind of shit I'm afraid of. Red tape bullshit fucking sucks.

the only things i know of that you have to worry about with the website world, is never using copyrighted images, or images that aren't of your own pure creation (Every single last layer is of your own making) and the same with fonts.

also there have been issues with a company representing blind people and people with less than good vision going around sueing website makers for not having websites that work with text to speech programs. to get round this, when writing my webpages, i just copied every single piece of text, put them into a basically divided page (cross page lines) with titles for each page above them, and then bracket marked sections to represent images , like so -

( there is an image of ...... )

and then continued with the text. quite simple, and only added about 3 minutes to my website pages after i had the basic code written in. just a matter of copying and pasting into this document, and linking it from the main page. that way, whatever i write was available for txt2speech users. sure it wouldnt be exciting, but how can a website be when youre using t2s? i never questioned how a blind person manages to navigate using a mouse or HID other than a braille kb, but to keep them happy, boring text pages were made.

Yeah, I tend to rely too much on Creative Commons stuff.