Geographical Location Default Home Page - sitecore

Question

I have the below site structure. When you access the site MyWebsite.com by default the page being loaded is Home item under Korea (MyWebsite/Korea/Home).
What I need to do is:
When the site is being access in china the default homepage should be the one under china (MyWebsite/china/Home). Same thing with Japan, when the site is access or browse in japan the default homepage should be the one in Japan(MyWebsite/Japan/Home). Other than this, the default homepage should be the one under in Korea.
How to do this? And what is the best of doing this in Sitecore.
I am experimenting about Geolocation HTML5 API to determine the location. Then redirects to the appropriate page once I know the location. But I am hesitant becuase I am thinking that there maybe a better way of doing this in Sitecore.
Your advice and help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

Answer 1

Your options appear to be:
Use a geoIP lookup service in a pipeline to redirect the user based on their location - Maxmind provides a free implementation that will give you the country.
You can change your approach slightly - using geoip to persoanlise the homepage using Sitecore's personalisation engine. This way you have 1 home page, but present different components to a user depending on their location. this is ideal if the content varies but the overall site structure is the same for each site.
If the sites are fundamentally different then you can set them up as separate sites in Sitecore and bind them to different host names i.e mysite.jp, mysite.cn etc. With your current set up you may experience problems with cross links - i.e visitors on the chinese site being able to access korean pages.
The final option (which i believe is now available in sitecore 8) is to have 1 homepage and vary the presentation by language. This was not previously possible as the layout field was shared.
To expand on this option - Sitecore 8 has changed the way that the page layout is created. Previously the __Renderings field was shared across all language versions. This is still the case however there is now the addition of a _FinalRenderings field. If you open an item and look at the presentation > details view from the ribbon you will see two tabs - shared layout and final layout. It is this final layout that can be varied across language versions. If you open the page in page editor then it is this final layout that you are editing. See the following blogs for a more detailed explanation:
http://www.seanholmesby.com/presentation-details-changes-in-sitecore-8-how-renderings-are-stored/
http://roundedcube.com/Blog/2015/exploring-sitecore-8-versioned-layouts
To implement this, open your base homepage - Korean i think in your example and create a new language version in say Japanese (here is a link to a useful tool from the Sitecore marketplace to instantly copy all the content from the Korean version - not sure if it works on 8 though https://www.cognifide.com/blogs/sitecore/quickly-create-new-language-versions-on-your-sitecore-cms/ )
Once you have your Japanese version open the presentation details and start editing the layout. If you now publish and view the Korean page you should see a different layout to the Korean version.
Once you have done this, you will solve your problem by using Sitecore language settings to control your content - if the user changes language, or if you go to www.mysite.com/jp-jp then you should see the Japanese version of the homepage

Answer 2

As #Moorag suggests, a Geo IP service (or local database) is a common way to achieve location based redirection. There are already modules in the Sitecore marketplace to help with this. Here's a good one:
Geiolite Lookup Provider
.. and here are some good posts on the subject:
Sitecore GeoIP Country Resolving - Jump to Lightspeed
Sitecore GeoIP: Helping The First Visit
If you're concerned about the overhead that doing a lookup entails, then a lighter weight option is to try to initially determine the country/language using the user's browser settings which are included as part of the request. This post has the code to achieve it:
Get language and country from a browser in ASP.NET
It's less accurate, but can be a good "first pass" option before going to the Geo IP lookup if it fails.