Web design · UAE · Saudi Arabia · GCC
Web Design That Wins Clients Across the Gulf
Custom, bilingual, mobile-first websites for businesses in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. Fixed written prices, a dated schedule, a site you own outright.
AED 4,700
bilingual site, from
Five pages in Arabic and English, custom design, first year of hosting included
SAR 4,800
the same, in riyals
Saudi prices are published in riyals, with Qatar from QAR 4,700 and Kuwait from KWD 395
4–8 wks
typical delivery
A dated schedule is agreed before any work begins, not estimated afterwards
Istanbul
where we actually are
No Gulf office, no rented address, no pretending otherwise
What this page covers
Key takeaways
- A Gulf website has about forty seconds to prove you are real and reachable. Everything else is secondary.
- Arabic and English are two sites sharing one technical foundation, not one site with a language switch.
- Most businesses want a content-managed build. Custom earns its cost only when the site does something rather than says something.
- Prices are published in dirhams and riyals, quoted fixed in writing, never billed by the hour.
- Domain, hosting and code are in your name from day one. There is no lock-in to recover from later.
- We are a studio in Istanbul. For some projects a local Gulf agency is the better choice, and we say which.
What is on this page
How Gulf customers actually buy
Most briefs that reach us describe a design. The question that decides whether a website earns money is narrower: what does a buyer here do between hearing your name and contacting you?
The sequence is consistent from Dubai to Riyadh to Doha. Someone is given your name, or sees you in a search result. They look you up on a phone within a minute, often on mobile data. They spend well under a minute deciding whether you are a real company doing real work at a plausible scale. Then, if convinced, they send a WhatsApp message. They do not fill in a form and wait.
Every stage has a design consequence, and most are unglamorous. Being found means the page exists for the thing they typed, in the language they typed it in. Looking real means specifics: a street address, named people, photographs of your own work rather than stock, client names you may use, and a price somewhere on the site. Vagueness reads as inexperience or evasion, and in a referral market both are expensive.
Being contactable means matching the habit rather than fighting it. In most of the GCC that habit is WhatsApp, and a business answering it within the hour beats a better-designed competitor who replies to form submissions the next morning. Phone numbers should dial, addresses should open a map, and both go on every page.
The emphasis shifts city by city, which is why we keep separate notes for Dubai, Riyadh and Doha rather than pretending the Gulf is one market.
Who we build for
We build for small and medium businesses that sell something specific to someone identifiable: professional services, clinics, contractors and industrial suppliers, family trading groups with several divisions, hospitality operators, and retail brands selling direct. The common factor is not the sector but that somebody in the business can answer questions about how customers decide.
Who we are the wrong choice for matters as much. If you need people in the room weekly, on-site photography, or a vendor with local commercial registration for government procurement, hire locally. If you want the cheapest template and do not mind what it says, marketplaces will beat our price. If you need a site live in five days, we will say we cannot do it well rather than promise and miss.
Some projects are not web design projects. A working site with a weak conversion path needs interface work, not a rebuild. A business nobody can find needs search work first. Saying so early costs us work and saves both sides a bad engagement.
What every build includes
Six things are in every quote at every price. They are not upgrades, and they are not line items we remove to hit a lower number.
Custom design
Designed for your business rather than assembled from a purchased theme. That does not mean decorative: the structure, the order of the page and the wording are chosen for what you sell and who buys it.
Mobile-first build
Laid out at phone width first and expanded to desktop, because that is the order visitors arrive in. Tap targets sized for thumbs, forms that do not need pinching, images that do not cost half a megabyte.
Bilingual ready
Arabic and English as equal versions, with their own content, their own page titles and correct hreflang between them. Right-to-left is designed in from the first layout, not mirrored at the end.
Speed engineering
Images sized and converted properly, caching configured, scripts kept to what is needed, hosting chosen for latency to your market. Speed is measured against Core Web Vitals thresholds, not described as fast in a proposal.
SEO foundations
A page structure matching real queries, one clear heading per page, clean addresses, structured data, sitemaps and analytics connected before launch. Not a substitute for ongoing SEO work, but that work then starts from a sound base.
Lead capture you can audit
WhatsApp, phone and form routes on every page, each tested on a real device, with submissions delivered to an address you control and counted. If you cannot see how many enquiries the site produced last month, it is not finished.
What it costs, tier by tier
Published prices, in dirhams and riyals, the same figures for every client. The last column matters most: it is what each tier does not include, so nobody discovers it mid-build.
| Tier | UAE / Dubai | Saudi Arabia | What it includes | What it does not include |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilingual starter | AED 4,700 | SAR 4,800 | Five pages in Arabic and English, custom design, contact and WhatsApp routes, first year of hosting | A blog, store, bookings, integrations, or writing beyond five pages |
| Business site | AED 9,900 | SAR 9,900 | Around fifteen pages planned against real queries, blog, a page per service, lead tracking | Transactions, member areas, CRM or ERP connections, catalogue imports |
| Online store | AED 16,500 | SAR 16,800 | Up to about 100 products, local payment methods, cash on delivery, shipping rules, tax settings | Unlimited catalogues, warehouse or ERP sync, marketplace feeds, product photography |
| Custom build | from AED 29,000 | from SAR 29,600 | Portals, booking engines, member areas, calculators, integrations with systems you run | A four-week timeline, or a fixed price before the scope is written down |
| Care plan | AED 290/mo or 2,190/yr | SAR 299/mo or 2,200/yr | Hosting, backups, updates, uptime monitoring, an hour of changes each month | New pages, redesigns, marketing, or third-party licence fees |
Prices exclude tax: VAT is 5% in the UAE and 15% in Saudi Arabia, while Qatar and Kuwait apply none at present. Qatar builds start at QAR 4,700 and Kuwait at KWD 395. Three-year totals are in the cost guides for Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait; every package is on our pricing page.
Two things we do not do. We do not bill by the hour, because an hourly rate makes our inefficiency your problem. And we do not quote low and recover it through change requests: if the brief grows, we price the change in writing first.
Why Gulf websites fail
We have taken over enough half-working sites to see the same six faults. None is a design fault, which is why a redesign rarely fixes them.
English only, or Arabic added last
A site in English alone is invisible to much of its own market. Worse is Arabic added at the end by machine: native readers identify it in a sentence, and it costs trust at the moment the visitor was deciding whether you are serious. Arabic is written or it is absent.
A form as the only route
A form asks a stranger to write into a box and trust that somebody reads it: the highest-friction option on the page. Put WhatsApp and a dialling number beside it, on every page, and the same traffic produces far more enquiries.
Designed on a desktop, for a desktop
The decision is taken on a large monitor in a meeting; the site is judged on a phone in a car. Menus needing precision, tables scrolling off screen, hero images pushing useful content below the fold, forms demanding nine fields.
No proof of anything
Claims without evidence read as filler. A page saying nothing beyond leading provider of quality solutions gives a buyer no reason to choose you. Named projects, real photographs, quantities, years and locations convert. If you have none yet, say what you do.
Nobody owns it
The domain is registered to a former agency, the hosting sits on their account, and you hold no administrator password. Everything works until you want to change agency, at which point the site is a hostage. We have spent weeks recovering domains in this situation.
Nothing is measured
A site with no analytics and no enquiry counting cannot be improved, only re-decorated. Without numbers, arguments about it are arguments about taste, and any advertising you run afterwards spends money into a black box.
The build, end to end
A fixed price is half of what you are buying. The other half is a date, and knowing what has to be true for that date to hold.
Nothing in that diagram is unusual. What is unusual is agreeing it in writing before the first invoice, with each stage dated, so that a delay is visible when it happens rather than at the end.
Week by week, and what you supply
The same schedule in full. The third column is the one worth reading before you sign anything: almost every late launch in this industry is a content delay wearing a technical costume.
| Week | What we do | What you supply that week | If it is late |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Discovery call, page structure agreed, keyword and competitor review, schedule dated | Brief, logo and brand files, analytics access, the decision-maker on the call | Everything moves. This week has no slack |
| Week 2 | Homepage and one inner page designed, in both directions, for approval | Written approval or consolidated comments, in one pass not three | Revisions compound and week 3 starts without a signed-off direction |
| Week 3 | Remaining designs, English copy drafted, Arabic writing begins | Photographs, team names and titles, service descriptions, any figures you want used | We write placeholders, and you pay for the rewrite later |
| Week 4 | Build starts: templates, navigation, forms, both language trees | Arabic reviewed by someone in your business who reads it natively | Arabic ships unchecked or the date moves. We recommend the second |
| Weeks 5–6 | Pages built, content loaded, speed work, structured data, analytics connected | Final content gaps, price confirmations, hosting or domain access | Launch slips roughly a week per outstanding item |
| Week 7 | Testing on real devices, both languages, all forms, redirect map for any old site | A review pass and a list of corrections | Corrections move into the post-launch window |
| Week 8 | Launch, training session, handover of every credential, monitoring | An hour for training, and the name of whoever will maintain the site | The site goes live with nobody able to edit it |
We send this table with the proposal, dated to your project, and tell you which week we are in. If that pace does not suit you, say so at briefing and we will plan a longer schedule rather than one you will miss. Tell us the deadline you actually have.
How a project runs
01
Discovery and a fixed quote
A call of thirty to forty minutes about what you sell and how customers reach you now. Within three working days you get a written scope, a fixed price and a launch date. If the project is wrong for us, that is when we say so.
02
Design
You approve a homepage and one inner page before anything else is designed or built. Both are shown left-to-right and right-to-left, so the Arabic version is judged as a design rather than accepted as a consequence.
03
Build
Templates, content, both language trees, forms, speed work and structured data. You get a staging address from the first week and can watch it take shape rather than wait for a reveal.
04
Launch and support
Tested on real devices, redirects in place if there was an old site, then live. You get a training session, recordings of it, and every credential. The domain and hosting are in your name and always were.
Content-managed or custom
The decision with the largest effect on what the site costs you over three years, and usually made for the wrong reasons. Compared on what actually differs.
| Content-managed build | Custom build | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | AED 4,700 to 16,500 depending on scope | From AED 29,000, and genuinely open-ended above that |
| Time to change a page | Minutes, by someone in your office, with no invoice | Hours to days, through a developer, usually billable |
| Time to add a feature | Often same-day, using established components | A specification, an estimate, a build and a test cycle |
| Hosting | Ordinary shared or managed hosting, low and predictable monthly cost | An application environment that has to be maintained and monitored |
| Who can maintain it | Your team after an hour of training, or any competent agency anywhere | A developer who knows this codebase, or whoever wrote it |
| Where it runs out | Complex logic, heavy transaction volume, unusual data relationships | Nowhere technical. It runs out of budget and of people who understand it |
| Honest verdict | Right for roughly nine of ten businesses that ask us | Right when the site does something rather than says something |
The trap is choosing custom for a brochure site, then finding every text change needs a developer, so changes stop, the site goes stale, and the business concludes that websites do not work. We have inherited that site more than once. An online store sits between the two: off-the-shelf platform, work in configuration and content rather than code.
How we choose between them
Three questions, in this order, usually settle it before anyone mentions technology.
Does the site need to do something, or say something? A site that presents a business, ranks for services and collects enquiries is saying something, and a content-managed build does that better and cheaper. A site that calculates a quote, books against real availability, shows a customer their own data or talks to a system you run is doing something, and that needs code written for you.
Who will change it in eighteen months? The question that gets skipped. If the honest answer is a marketing coordinator who has never seen a terminal, anything needing a developer for a price change will not be changed. We would rather build something less elegant that stays current than something admirable that freezes on handover.
What happens if we are not here? Studios close, agencies are dropped, relationships end. A content-managed build on a standard platform can be picked up by any competent team in Dubai, Riyadh or anywhere else. A bespoke application can be picked up by whoever will read it, a smaller and dearer group. We treat that as a cost of going custom.
In Saudi Arabia a fourth question appears for consumer sellers: build a store at all, or trade on a local platform. Most Saudi merchants are better served by Salla or Zid, where local payments, Arabic-first storefronts and e-invoicing are solved already. We design on those platforms, and we say plainly when a self-hosted store is the dearer route to the same outcome.
How two languages relate
The commonest bilingual mistake is treating Arabic as a setting. It is a second version of the site, sharing the machinery and nothing else.
Because the addresses differ, each version can be found on its own terms, and Google can serve the right one to the right searcher. The mechanism is documented in Google’s guidance on localised versions, and getting it wrong is the reason many Gulf sites have an Arabic half that no Arabic search ever reaches.
How we handle Arabic properly
Right-to-left is not a text alignment. It is a mirror the whole interface passes through, and the parts that break are never the paragraphs. They are the details nobody thinks to check, and here is what we test on every bilingual build:
- Navigation order, so the menu reads from the right and the logo sits where an Arabic reader expects
- Form fields and labels, including error messages, placeholders and the tab order between inputs
- Directional icons: arrows, back buttons, carousel controls and anything with a chevron
- Breadcrumbs, pagination and sliders, the three components that most often stay stubbornly left-to-right
- Spacing and padding, since margins correct on the left become wrong when the layout flips
- A typeface designed for Arabic, not a Latin font with an Arabic fallback bolted underneath
- Line height, because Arabic needs more vertical room than the same text in English
Content is the other half, and the half that decides whether the Arabic version earns anything. We write Arabic rather than translate it, in Modern Standard Arabic with Gulf vocabulary, against its own keyword research. Arabic searchers phrase things differently, so a literal translation targets queries nobody types. Clients may supply the Arabic themselves; what we advise against every time is machine translation, which native readers spot immediately.
The reverse case is worth saying too. If your buyers are expatriate procurement managers and international suppliers, English may genuinely lead and Arabic follow. We ask who buys rather than assume. Our multilingual platform case study shows several languages held together properly.
What we need from you
We can start with less, and often do. But the projects that land on schedule are the ones where these arrive in the first fortnight.
- One decision-maker who can approve a design without convening a committee, available for a call in week one
- Your logo as a vector file if one exists, plus any brand guidelines, colours and typefaces in use
- Photographs of your own work, premises, products or team. This is the largest quality difference between two sites at the same price
- The services or products you want pages for, ranked by what you most want to sell
- Access to your existing site, domain registrar, hosting and analytics, or an admission that nobody knows who holds them
- A native Arabic reader in your business who will spend an hour reviewing the Arabic before launch
- The real deadline, and the reason for it: an exhibition, a launch, a funding round
We do not need a finished brief, a wireframe or a specification. If you have them we will read them; a rough idea and a willingness to answer questions works as well. What genuinely stalls a project is a client unreachable for three weeks in the middle. If next month is impossible, start the month after. Tell us what you are building and we will say what it needs.
What else we do
Design is rarely the only thing a project needs. These are quoted separately, so nothing is bundled in to pad a number.
UI/UX design
Journey and interface work for platforms, portals and apps, tested in both directions. UI/UX design.
Online stores
Stores on WooCommerce, Shopify, Salla or Zid with local payments and cash on delivery. E-commerce development.
SEO
Arabic and English search work: real queries, technical fixes, reporting you can verify. SEO services.
Google Ads
Campaign structure, bilingual ad copy and conversion tracking, on a fixed fee. Google Ads management.
Digital marketing
Content, social and campaign work joined up rather than run in parallel. Digital marketing.
Prices
Every package, in dirhams and riyals, with what each one excludes. Published pricing.
“A Gulf website rarely closes the deal. It earns the message that starts one, and it has about forty seconds to do it.”
Related reading
City notes, cost guides and worked examples, if you are weighing up a project:
- Dubai and Abu Dhabi — how the two Emirates differ, and what that changes in a brief
- Riyadh and Jeddah — committees in the capital, relationships on the coast
- Doha and Kuwait City — smaller markets where one well-built site can dominate a category
- What a website costs in Dubai — three-year totals, not headline prices
- A Dubai tourism case study and a multilingual platform case study — two different builds explained
- Our writing — longer pieces on bilingual search, speed and Gulf buyers
For the technical standards we build to, Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance sets the speed thresholds every site of ours is measured against, and the structured data we add is defined at schema.org.
Questions
How long does a website take?
Four weeks for a five-page bilingual site, four to six for a fifteen-page business site, six to eight for a store, and months for a custom platform. You get a dated schedule before work starts, and the table above shows what has to arrive when.
Do you build websites in Arabic?
Yes, and properly. Arabic is written rather than translated, with its own keyword research, and right-to-left is designed in from the first layout. Navigation, forms, icons, breadcrumbs, spacing and typography all mirror correctly.
Can we update the site ourselves?
Yes. Almost everything we build is content-managed, so text, images, pages and prices are editable from your office. You get a training session, recordings of it, and step-by-step videos for the jobs you will do most often.
Do you work with clients outside Turkey?
Most of our work is outside Turkey: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain. We work Gulf hours and have live Dubai projects.
How much does a website cost?
From AED 4,700 or SAR 4,800 for five pages, AED 9,900 for a fifteen-page business site, AED 16,500 for a store, and from AED 29,000 for a custom build. Every quote is fixed in writing, and we do not bill by the hour.
Do we need to be in the Gulf to work with you?
No, and neither do we. We are a studio in Istanbul with no Gulf office, address or landline, and we will not pretend otherwise. Projects run on WhatsApp, email and scheduled calls.
Who owns the domain and hosting?
You do, from day one, in your own name and on your own account. If your domain is stuck with a previous agency we will help you recover it, which usually takes a few weeks.
What happens when we want changes after launch?
Small edits you do yourself. Anything larger is quoted individually, or covered by a care plan from AED 290 a month covering hosting, backups, updates and an hour of changes.
Can you rebuild our site without losing our Google rankings?
Yes, and it is planned before anything is built. We map every existing address to its replacement, put permanent redirects in place at launch, and keep the structure already earning traffic. Recovery, where there is movement at all, is usually weeks.
Would a local Gulf agency be a better choice for us?
Sometimes. If you need workshops in a room, on-site photography and video, a vendor with local commercial registration for government procurement, or somebody present when a stakeholder changes their mind, hire locally and do not let us talk you out of it. We are the better fit when the budget is fixed, the bilingual writing has to be good, and remote working suits your team.
What do you build on?
A content-managed platform for most projects, because you can then change the site without paying anybody. We write custom code when the site has to calculate, book, integrate or hold customer accounts.
What is not included in your prices?
Tax, at 5% in the UAE and 15% in Saudi Arabia. Photography and video. Stock imagery beyond a modest allowance. Third-party licences, which we list before you commit. Advertising spend. Writing beyond your tier page count.
Who writes the content?
We write the English and the Arabic unless you would rather supply either. What we advise against is machine translation in either direction: native speakers spot it, and it targets queries nobody searches. We will ask you for facts, figures and photographs, because those we cannot invent.
How do payments work?
Half on signing, half before launch, invoiced in your currency where we can. Care plans are monthly or annual, and annual is cheaper. No hourly charges, no percentage fees.
Tell us what you are building
Describe the business and the deadline. You will get a written scope, a fixed price in dirhams or riyals, and a launch date within three working days.