Hiring a web designer in Sharjah: how to scope it, brief it and check the proposal
A buyer's guide for Sharjah businesses: what to put in the brief, which questions separate a serious web proposal from a padded one, and what to verify before signing.
Most website projects in Sharjah go wrong before anyone opens a design tool. The brief is two paragraphs, three agencies quote against three different assumptions, and the cheapest number wins. Nine months on, the site is half finished, the Arabic pages were never written, and nobody can update the product list without calling the developer.
This is a guide to the buying part, not the building part. Whether you run a trading company in SAIF Zone, a fabrication business in Hamriyah, a clinic in Al Majaz or a publishing house in Sharjah Publishing City, these are the decisions that determine whether the money produces anything.
Scope it around a job, not a page count
A page count is the least useful way to describe a website. Start with the single transaction you want the site to carry.
For a Hamriyah Free Zone manufacturer, that is usually a technical enquiry from a buyer who wants to know whether you can make a part to spec. For a Shams-licensed studio it is a portfolio that survives a two-minute skim on a phone. For a retailer licensed by the Sharjah Economic Development Department, it may genuinely be online checkout, which is a different and more expensive animal.
Write that down first, then let the agency propose the pages. A proposal that lists pages but never says what the site is for is selling layout, not thinking.
Decide the language question before you ask for a price
Arabic is the official language of the UAE, and for anything touching government, family-owned groups, or Sharjah's cultural and publishing sector, an Arabic version is not optional. It is also the single largest cost variable that briefs forget to mention.
There are three honest positions. Pick one before you compare quotes:
- 01English only. Defensible for an exporter whose buyers sit in Europe or East Africa. Say so explicitly so nobody prices Arabic in.
- 02Full bilingual with a right-to-left layout. Arabic is not a translated column dropped into an English design. The layout mirrors, the navigation flips, the icons that imply direction flip, and the typeface has to be a real Arabic face rather than a fallback. Expect this to add meaningfully to both design and build.
- 03Arabic-first with English secondary. Rarer, and correct for some publishing, legal and government-adjacent businesses in Sharjah.
Sharjah's workforce and customer base also speak Urdu, Malayalam, Hindi, Tagalog and Pashto in large numbers. That rarely justifies more translated versions, but it should change how you write the English. Plain vocabulary and short sentences land where clever wordplay does not.
Ask any shortlisted agency to show you an Arabic page they built, on a phone. If they can only show a Google-translated demo, price the Arabic work as unproven.
What belongs in the brief
Keep it to two pages. These are the parts that change the price, so leaving them out just guarantees a quote you cannot rely on.
- Your licence and entity. SEDD mainland, or one of the free zones such as SAIF Zone, Hamriyah, Shams, Sharjah Publishing City, SRTIP or Sharjah Healthcare City. It affects which legal details go in the footer and which data rules apply to you.
- Who has to approve. One decision maker, or a family board that meets monthly. Say which. Approval structure drives timeline more than design complexity does.
- What content already exists. Real photography of your factory, warehouse or clinic, or nothing yet. Written copy, or notes. This is the most underestimated line in any web project.
- Whether you sell online. Enquiry forms and card checkout are different projects with different compliance obligations.
- Who updates the site afterwards. If nobody on your team can publish a news item without a developer, you will stop publishing.
Reading the proposal
Signs the proposal is serious
A good proposal disagrees with part of your brief. It will tell you the twelve pages you asked for are really four templates, or that the checkout is not worth building until the enquiry flow works. It names who does the work, and it carries a content deadline with your name against it, because that is where projects stall.
It should also be specific about performance. Visitors on Etisalat and du mobile connections are not on office fibre, and a heavy page feels heavy. Ask what the target load time is and how it gets measured after launch, not just on the day the site goes live.
Signs to slow down
- A fixed price with no assumptions listed. Every real quote rests on assumptions, and hiding them means the variation orders come later.
- No mention of who owns the code, the design files and the domain at the end.
- A portfolio of sites that are no longer live. Check the URLs yourself.
- Hosting and maintenance quoted as a single unexplained monthly figure.
- Ranking guarantees. Nobody can guarantee a search position, and an agency that offers one is telling you how it handles inconvenient facts.
The compliance questions worth asking out loud
You do not need to be a lawyer, but you should hear sensible answers here.
Personal data. Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data sets the federal rules on collecting and processing personal data, and it is the regime a Sharjah mainland or Sharjah free zone company generally falls under. In practice your contact form needs a privacy notice, a lawful basis for contacting people afterwards, and somebody who knows where those submissions are stored.
Selling online. Federal Decree-Law No. 14 of 2023 on Trading by Modern Technological Means governs commerce conducted through websites, apps and similar channels, and sits alongside Federal Law No. 15 of 2020 on Consumer Protection. The practical effect is that your prices, returns terms, delivery terms and seller identity have to be clearly disclosed on the site rather than buried in a PDF.
Tax display. VAT is 5 per cent. Whether your listed prices include it is your decision, but the site has to say which.
Domain. A .ae domain is administered by the aeDA under the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority, and restricted categories require supporting documents. Register it in your company's name, through an accredited registrar, on your own account. Domains held in an agency's account are the most common hostage situation in this industry.
Payments, if money changes hands
Price in dirhams, with AED shown plainly. Beyond international cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay are table stakes on mobile. The UAE also runs its own rails: Jaywan, the domestic card scheme, and Aani, the instant payment service, both operated by Al Etihad Payments under the Central Bank. Ask your gateway what it supports, and ask the agency to build checkout so a new method can be added without a redesign.
Timelines and the Sharjah calendar
Sharjah government entities have worked Monday to Thursday with a Friday to Sunday weekend since January 2022, while much of the private sector and the rest of the UAE works Monday to Friday. If your project needs approvals from a Sharjah authority or a university, plan around that gap rather than discovering it in week three.
Add the seasonal reality. Ramadan shortens working hours and slows approvals, and summer thins out decision makers. A publisher aiming to launch before the Sharjah International Book Fair should start months ahead, not weeks.
Vetting the partner itself
Ask for two client references you can phone, and ask them one question: what went wrong, and how was it handled. Every project has a bad week, and that answer tells you more than a case study does.
Check the practical things too. Which time zone the team sits in relative to Gulf Standard Time, and what response time is committed in writing. Whether you receive the repository and design files on final payment. Whether the site can move to another provider without a rebuild. A remote partner can serve Sharjah perfectly well, but only if those answers are written down rather than assumed.
The proposal you should trust is the one that tells you which part of your request is a bad idea.
FuturByte is a Dubai studio working remotely with clients across Sharjah and the northern emirates. If you want a second opinion on a brief or a quote already in front of you, send it over. We will tell you what we would question, even if the answer is that the other proposal is better.
