What you do can be affected by if you looking to freelance or go full time with an employer, but in the early days, I guess there's not much difference.
You want to practice your skills early on a great way if your having trouble finding work is to volunteer for a local company. It's a great way to get hands-on experience and quickly find out what type of work you enjoy.
I have a developer in my team that volunteered one day a week whilst working and eventually we offered him a full-time job.
On the other side, freelancing is also good for getting experience with clients and earning whilst you do it.
As for what type of job should you apply for it's hard to say if you feel confident in your abilities there is no harm in applying for development role but early on its maybe better to apply for entry-level roles like a junior developer that way the expectations are not high and you'll actively be trained on the job.
There are specialist and all-rounders, ie can design and develop I realised early on design was not for me so concentrated on development. I do think its important to be able to use HTML/CSS for the front-end in smaller teams you'll be doing a bit of everything so it helps to have some front-end knowledge.