Ben Bodien …

At HP, if you’re not in the USA and you don’t think to inform them as such when you hit the homepage using the dropdown at the top (not a primary nav element by any means), you’re in for a big dose of inconvenient.

Typical usage path for HP website (at least, mine, a few minutes ago):

1. Hit www.hp.com
2. Select “Small & Medium Business”, “Servers”
3. Happily follow the information path to find a suitable server (either by choosing a product family, or trying the product chooser)
4. Arrive at a server you’re quite interested in
5. Notice that the price is quoted in USD, which for someone who lives and works in the UK, is a problem
6. Try and work out how to get to the UK equivalent page, and notice that the dropdown country selector that’s typical of such companies is just flat, unbudging text.

So you have to back out all the way to the homepage, switch to your country, and then navigate back down to the product you wanted.

Some companies will force you to specify your country or region through a splash page (ABit, Asus) which would have prevented this problem. A direct competitor to HP forgoes a splash, but instead makes the default country so much more obvious with a flag icon that stands out on the page. 

Presumably, differences in regional catalogues make it too complicated to allow visitors to hop between regions from any page on the site, but this would clearly be the ideal. In the meantime, things like country selectors and age verification forms justify splash pages, because if you don’t ask for that information up front and your assumption turns out to be wrong, that will be a problem.