What's the best homepage experince for an international site?

[RobertChapman]

Greeting Mozzers.

I have a question for the community, which I would appreciate your input on.

If you have a single gTLD that services multiple countires, what do you think is the best homepage UX for the root homepage and why?

So the example would be you own website www.company.org and target content to Germany, Japan and Australia with content through the folder structure eg. www.company.org/de-de

If someone comes to the www.company.org from a region, would you:

• Redirect them based on location IP – so if from Germany they land on www.company.org/de-de
• Let them land on the homepage which offers location selection
• Let them land on a page with content and offer location selection eg. pop-up or obvious selection box
• Something I’ve not thought of…

I'd appreciate your input.

Thanks

[Everett]

Hello Robert,

This is a question many businesses struggle with, as you might imagine. There really is no "perfect" solution for every situation so I won't try to speak in best practices other than to say don't annoy the user. If I'm trying to get to your .com home page but I just happen to be travelling in Germany for business an automatic redirect to the German page would drive me nuts.

If it were my site I'd probably take the third option. Specifically, I'd sniff out the geolocation based on their IP address and serve a custom pop-up in the language of that country offering something like "Would you like to see the [Country-Language] version"?

If I'm in Germany and land on the English default ".com" page I will not be surprised or frustrated by a pop-up or a custom message on the page asking "Möchten Sie die deutsche Version zu sehen?". I'd probably just X-out of it and move on.

That's pretty much what this site does when I view from a US location: https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts .

It asks me, in English, if I want to translate to English, and offers two clear options along with a third x-out option. Or I could ignore it because it's pretty unobtrusive on desktop.

No matter which approach you choose, be sure to research best practices on using attributes and tags like  rel="alternate" hreflang="x" and rel="canonical".

I'll leave this question open for discussion since there are many potential approaches that might answer your question.