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?
It's a cloaking technique, to deliver different site content based on things like an IP address, useragent or referer. What you want to do I'd call Geo Targeted IP delivery, many sites, even Google use geo targeting for localisation purposes similar to what you have in mind. http://stroseo.com/navigation/geo-targeting-with-ip-delivery/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo_targeting A great guide to using the maxmind db: http://programmerdot.com/17/maxmind-geoip-php.htm I've seen a few PHP/Perl scripts around which can give you a head start like this: http://www.seoegghead.com/blog/seo/simple-geotarget-php-library-p61.html http://hamletbatista.com/2007/06/26/legitimate-cloaking-real-world-example-and-php-source-code/ http://webnet77.com/scripts/geo-ip/country-redirect-script.html or you could try something like this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/l-redirector/ http://de77.com/php/how-to-detect-users-countrylanguage-the-simple-way