I am creating a new multilingual website where we have a single primary domain (.com) and the language is handled via different URL routings e.g:
www.foobar.com/US/About
www.foobar.com/UK/About
www.foobar.com/DE/About
I have the facility for the user to change the region from those available at any time during their stay on the website. The selection is stored in a cookie and is automatically applied on any subsequent visit.
Should a user navigate to a URL without any region specified e.g.
www.foobar.com/About
The system defaults to US and redirects automatically to
www.foobar.com/US/About
This is working perfectly and the client is happy with this.
The client has now asked that on the first visit to the site the user is presented with a "pop-up" that forces them to choose a region - to ensure that they are looking at relevant content.
Whilst I appreciate his concern I am looking for a less intrusive mechanism of clearly highlighting that a region selection is available on first visit - this must also work well on mobile devices.
The currently selected region is displayed using a clearly visible "flag" icon at the right-hand side of the top navigation bar (24px x 24px) - but I am thinking I could just highlight this somehow on first visit to make it clearlymore noticeable than normal, but I had also considered a sliding div (from top or side of page) or a bootstrap dialog.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to handle this cleanly without irritating new visitors?