Hiring a web partner in Abu Dhabi: how to scope it, brief it and read the proposal

Most of the money wasted on websites in Abu Dhabi is wasted before anyone opens a design tool. It goes on a scope nobody pressure tested, a brief listing pages instead of describing a problem, and a proposal read for its total rather than its assumptions. This is a guide to those three steps, for the person signing the cheque.

We are a Dubai studio and we work with clients in the capital remotely, which is normal here and usually irrelevant to the outcome. What matters is whether the people you hire understand what an Abu Dhabi build has to satisfy. Many do not, and you find out at the compliance review.

Before the scope: decide what the site has to change

The useful starting point is not "we need a new website". It is a sentence about what currently goes wrong. A Mussafah industrial supplier whose buyers cannot find part specifications has a different project from a Hub71 startup trying to look fundable, and both differ from an ADGM advisory firm whose compliance team approves every public word. Write that sentence first. It decides how much of the budget belongs in design, in content and in integration.

Scope: what this market adds to a build

Generic scopes miss four things that are genuinely local. Each one has a cost. Get them priced in the proposal rather than discovered in month three.

Arabic is a legal question, not a preference

Under Federal Law No. 15 of 2020 on Consumer Protection, information, advertising, contracts and invoices supplied to consumers must be available in Arabic, with other languages permitted alongside it. If you are a UAE registered supplier selling online, that reaches your product descriptions, your terms and your warranty information.

So the question is not "do we want Arabic". It is which parts are legally required, who writes them, and whether the build handles right to left properly. Right to left is not a stylesheet flag. Mirrored navigation, flipped icons, line height for Arabic type, and a CMS that lets your team edit both versions without a developer: that is a real line item. Ask for it priced separately. A proposal that bundles "bilingual" into one word has not thought about it.

Worth remembering who else reads the site. Much of the workforce reading your careers page, delivery instructions and support content is more comfortable in Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu or Tagalog. That rarely means more translations. It means plain sentences and clear diagrams instead of clever copy.

Your jurisdiction decides your data rules

This is the one that catches people. If you hold a mainland licence from the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development, your handling of personal data sits under the federal regime, Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the protection of personal data. If you are licensed in Abu Dhabi Global Market, you sit under ADGM's own Data Protection Regulations instead, with its own registration and its own Commissioner.

Those are different obligations for the same contact form. Say in the brief which applies to you. If the agency never asks, that tells you something. The output is consent by genuine affirmative action rather than a pre-ticked box, a privacy notice describing what you actually do, and a record of where submissions are stored and who can reach them.

Sector permits sit on top

Some sectors need approval for the words on the page, not just for the business behind them. Health facilities here advertise under the Department of Health Abu Dhabi framework for health media and advertising, which governs claims, before and after imagery and practitioner credentials. Regulated financial firms in ADGM have their own communications rules. If that is you, the scope needs a named approval step with a realistic duration, and a CMS where a reviewer can see a change before it is public.

Payments, if you take them

Price in dirhams, with VAT treatment stated. Beyond cards and Apple Pay, the domestic rails have moved: the Central Bank's Aani instant payment platform and the Jaywan national card scheme are now established enough that the Ministry of Finance accepts both for federal fees and fines. Ask what the gateway integration actually covers, because that line item can mean an afternoon or a fortnight.

The brief: what to include beyond the usual

Our general advice on writing a brief holds anywhere. Four additions are specific to selling from Abu Dhabi.

1. 01Who approves, and on what rhythm. Abu Dhabi government entities work a four and a half day week, finishing around noon on Friday, and many private firms run Monday to Friday with the weekend on Saturday and Sunday. If your client side approvers are in a government affiliated entity, a Thursday afternoon review request lands on Monday. Say so in the brief and the timeline stops being fiction.
2. 02Whether you sell to government or to large corporates. If you do, your buyer will look for evidence of registration, supplier status and In-Country Value certification. That is a page with documents on it, not a paragraph of adjectives. It changes the information architecture.
3. 03How people find you physically. Abu Dhabi addresses use the Onwani system of named streets and building numbers, and most visitors route through Google Maps. Your contact page needs the real address and a business profile that matches it exactly.
4. 04What Arabic content already exists. Copy written by a person who knows your sector is the single biggest cost saver here. Machine output someone will rewrite is worse than nothing, because you pay twice.

Reading the proposal

Three proposals will rarely be comparable, which is the point. Compare assumptions, not totals.

Signs of a serious one

• It states what is not included: content writing, Arabic copy, photography, translation review, hosting. Silence there is not generosity.
• It names the number of unique page designs rather than the number of pages. Templates are where the economics live.
• It gives a performance target and says how it will be measured on real visitors, not on the developer's laptop.
• It says who owns the code, the design files and the domain at the end. Get that in writing before, not after.
• It has a content deadline for you, with a stated consequence. Projects here run late on copy and approvals far more often than on engineering.
• It prices Arabic as its own scope with its own review step.
• It says what happens after launch: who patches, who monitors, what a change request costs and how fast.

Signs to slow down

• A fixed price arriving within hours of first contact, with no questions about your licence, your approvers or your existing content.
• Portfolio work you cannot verify. Ask for live URLs and for one client you can call. A studio with real clients will arrange it.
• A pitch team that will not be the project team. Ask who writes the code and where they sit.
• Rankings or traffic promised as a deliverable. Nobody controls that, and a claim you cannot substantiate is a risk under UAE advertising rules for your business, not just theirs.
• A page count that grew during the sales conversation without the goal changing.
• Silence on who holds the hosting account. If the agency owns it, leaving later is expensive by design.

Three questions worth asking out loud

Show me a site you built with substantial Arabic content, and tell me who wrote it. The answer separates studios that have genuinely done this from studios that ran a plugin.

If I want to publish a press release myself on a Sunday evening, what do I do? A site your own team cannot update quietly stops earning, because you stop publishing.

What would you cut if my budget dropped by a third? A partner who answers that specifically is thinking about your outcome. One who says everything is essential is selling.

Ask every shortlisted agency to write down the three assumptions most likely to be wrong in their own estimate. The quality of that answer predicts the project better than the portfolio does.

None of this requires you to become technical. It requires treating the website as a procurement decision with named obligations, a real approval chain and a maintenance cost. If you want a second opinion on a scope or a proposal you already hold, send it to us and we will tell you what we would question, including when someone else is the better fit.