Position of help/description text

In case others are trying to do this, I succeeded by adding the following lines to my template.php file:

  function phptemplate_form_element($title, $value, $description = NULL, $id = NULL, $required = FALSE, $error = FALSE) {
    return _phptemplate_callback('form_element', array('value' => $value, 'title' => $title, 'description' => $description,
    'id' => $id, 'required' => $required, 'error' => $error));
  }

And then creating a form_element.tpl.php file that looked like:

<?
/**
 * Return a themed form element.
 *
 * @param $title the form element's title
 * @param $value the form element's data
 * @param $description the form element's description or explanation
 * @param $id the form element's ID used by the &lt;label&gt; tag
 * @param $required a boolean to indicate whether this is a required field or not
 * @param $error a string with an error message filed against this form element
 *
 * @return a string representing the form element
 */

?>
<div class="form-item">
<?
  $required = $required ? '<span class="form-required" title="'. t('This field is required.') .'">*</span>' : '';

  if ($title) {
    if ($id) {
      print ' <label for="'. form_clean_id($id) .'">'. t('%title: %required', array('%title' => $title, '%required' =>
      $required)) . "</label>\n";
    }
    else {
      print  ' <label>'. t('%title: %required', array('%title' => $title, '%required' => $required)) . "</label>\n";
    }
  }

  if ($description) {
    print  ' <div class="description"> '. $description ."</div>\n";
  }

  print  " $value\n";
?>
</div>