Question: As part of a registration form I am building I need to, at some point, differentiate between whether the user is a 'student' or 'professor'. I've seen this handled in two different ways and was curious if anyone had any thoughts or research on the benefits/downsides of each way.

Two separate sign-up buttons on homepage

[www.lore.com](http://www.lore.com) and
[www.piazza.com](http://www.piazza.com)

One sign-up button, then two choices as part of the sign-up flow

[www.schoology.com](http://www.schoology.com)

The first method is one less click for the user but can potentially make the homepage more confusing with two call to action buttons next to each other. Also, with the first method, you couldn't just have a single 'sign-up' button elsewhere on the site, you'd have to provide two 'sign-up' options at all times.

Answer: 
As long as you are not capturing different attributes for different types of users, don't give a different sign-up links. If the attributes you are capturing are almost same, then no need to give two sign-up links.

A fitting example of different sign-ups for different type of users would be www.iwriter.com where you can sign-up as publisher and advertiser.
You could use [paypal](https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=0Sl1tPLWqmtOlGOXgzEwkSQHYGJRnq4WK78iq1Lh5WH5fO-qKVvh-NwxMtq&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f8e263663d3faee8d0b7e678a25d883d0fa72c947f193f8fd) method its similar to the lore.com. As well Lore does it well big images big buttons there is almost 0% of mistake piazza is a bit harder, especially for children.

Another way you could incorporate this selection in to the form for example you can have a radio button as a 1st question in the sign up form "Student" or "Teacher" and then display relevant form.