mediajunk

Geo-redirecting -- redirecting users to different parts of your website depending on their own geographical location -- is a neat trick. It is handy when your website has different messages or product offers for users from different countries or regions.

But many website owners mistakenly assume that their geolocation software works every time. It doesn't!

Geolocation works in two steps:
1. A script detects the user's IP address.
2. The script looks up a database of IP addresses and their associated countries to tell where the user is located.

There are potential problems with both steps:
1. Many users go through proxy servers, so the IP address that appears to be associated with their computer is, in fact, the server's IP address, which may be in a different location.

2. There are many databases of IP addresses and their associated regions (some free, some commercial) but none is even 90% accurate. For example, look at this table of accuracy for city geolocation, from one of the leading providers of such databases, Maxmind.

The problem is that many websites lock users in to a region-specific part of the website, without giving them the option of choosing a different region. For example, users from Ireland are often taken to the UK versions of product websites, where prices are quoted in pounds sterling ... but Ireland is not part of the UK, and is in the Eurozone!

Another mistake is to make assumptions about a user's preferences based on their location (why not give UK users the option to pay in euros if they want?).

In fact, the makers of Firefox have made a bad assumption about my preferences, based on my geographic location, which prompted me to write this article.

I recently downloaded the latest version of Firefox and, while composing messages in Gmail, noticed that the spell-checker was underlining almost every word in red. I eventually discovered that my language had been set to Irish ... presumably because Firefox had detected my IP address as being in Ireland. (I can't think of any other reason. Certainly, I didn't change any settings.)

If so, even the usually reliable makers of Firefox have committed a gross geolocation foul. At least I was able to fix the problem. Website users who are locked in to a set of regional pages, however, may not have that luxury.

Tags: usability, web design, web development