I've seen websites use my IP-address to detect what location I'm in and display my city on a portion of their webpage. Is there a way to use the IP-address, detect where the user is at, and then change the whole webpage design based on the users location? For example, I if someone is looking at my webpage in CA, I want it to look differently compared to the guy who looks at it from NY. Anyone know if this can be done? and what is this ability technically called?
Sure you can do that. Server-side scripting like asp, asp.net, php, etc would be used to 'write' the html and what it writes can depend on a variable that you assign. The best way would be to design your page with blocks of content (e.g. left-top, left-bottom, center-top, center-bottom, right-top, right-bottom) and then put the content for each of those in a database, as html. So now, if you find the user's IP is from Japan your script gets each block of content in the database record for Japan. The one problem is in determining where the user really is. You can't really determine that a user is in California rather than Arizona for example, from his IP address. You could tell that is in the USA, but that's about it. If you had his zip code, sure you can do a zip code look up, find his state, and present content based on that. You also have the problem of proxies, whereby you are getting the IP address of the proxy, not the user. So overall, I would say that IP address is somewhat reliable to the country level, but it's not going to be more granular than that. /*tom*/