Where to place registration form and its contents in page horizontally?

Question

In a registration form I'm having trouble guessing where I should put the text and input fields. Obviously the default is flush against the left side of the screen which looks terrible. I noticed Facebook and Gmail have their registration forms on the right half of the page but other sites such as Yahoo have registration forms that start from the left and the input fields are stretched almost all the way to the right of the page. Where should input fields and headings be positioned?

Ok if you want to see it here it is. I was kind of embarrassed because I haven't done any work on it yet, I figured might as well ask first before heading down the wrong path and having people to tell me it's wrong.

EDIT: everyone's saying they need more details to answer the question but what details in particular do you need?

Answer 1

It's hard to answer your question directly and precisely without having a deeper knowledge about your particular form but you can still take a look at some of these:

http://www.smileycat.com/design_elements/registration_forms/

This gallery shows a lot of nicely done registration forms, so maybe some of these will be examples to follow for you, or at least inspiration.

The link is taken from another question here, on UX.SE, so you can look it through for further reference: How do you design a registration form?

By the way, some quick tips that may be useful as well, as they point out what you should definitely not go for: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/04/16/five-ux-antipatterns-to-avoid-when-designing-log-in-registration-areas/ - have a look at my favorite there, the honeypot technique, described here: http://www.ngenworks.com/blog/invisible_captcha_to_prevent_form_spam/

Answer 2

If that form is the only thing on the page, just put it somewhere centered in the users' view. Increase the distance between the fields so that caption are easily associated with the corresponding Input field (something that the stackoverflow login form you probably see at the end of this page doesn't do well). Also, make it pretty (something that the stackoverflow Login does very well)

Answer 3

A person reading a web page starts sweeping his/her eyes horizontally from left to right, often focusing on the upper-left corner of the page. (Note that this is fully related to the layout and purpose of the page!)

Since your only content on the page at the moment is the small registration form, you should center it, since the bigger screen your users have, the more "hidden" in the corner your registration form will be for them, since people sit infront of the monitor usually staring at the center of the monitor.

If it will stay as the only content you have on that page, you should just throw it on their face without them having to search for it!

If your form is placed in either corner of the screen, your users need to separately focus their eyes to it.

I would also suggest you to have your form in a bordered container, like fieldset or div with border, so it would visually look like one element (or set of grouped elements).