Arabic first. Not Arabic afterwards.
Websites, portals, learning platforms and commerce, built right-to-left from the first line rather than translated into it at the end.
Most bilingual sites are an English site, translated.
You can tell within seconds: the Arabic sits in a layout designed for English, the numbers face the wrong way, and the type is a size that suits Latin letters. This volume is about not doing that.
Bilingual is engineering
Translation is the last ten per cent of the work.
Clients often arrive believing the Arabic version is a content task: send the copy to a translator, paste it back, done. What follows is a familiar sequence of surprises.
Menus, arrows, progress bars and icons all still point the way English reads.
A phone number or product code inside an Arabic sentence lands in the wrong place, or reverses.
Arabic set at the Latin size reads small and cramped; ascenders and diacritics get clipped.
Error pages, form validation, emails, PDFs and the admin screens are found untranslated months later.
- —Does the layout mirror, including icons that imply direction?
- —Do numbers, codes and currency sit where they belong?
- —Is the Arabic set at a size that reads, not a converted one?
- —Do the system messages, emails and documents follow?
Both languages exist from the first page we build, and every screen is reviewed in both before it is called done. That sounds obvious; it is also the thing almost nobody does, because in the first week English alone feels faster.
The same page, three builds
Mirroring is not a stylesheet flag.
Everything with a direction has to flip: navigation, breadcrumbs, progress bars, sliders, table column order, even the side the axis of a chart sits on. What must not flip is anything that is a symbol — a phone number, a product reference, an email address.
- —Arabic set larger than the Latin equivalent, with more line height
- —Vertical room for diacritics so they are not clipped
- —Fonts that actually carry Arabic, not a fallback that appears later
- —Dates in the calendar the reader expects, Hijri where it matters
- —Search that finds a word however it was spelled
The third panel is not an illustration. It is what this page renders when a single isolation is left off — and it is what a great many bilingual Saudi sites are doing right now, on their contact page.
Numerals: Western digits throughout, each run isolated. Chosen because Saudi financial and regulatory documents use them.
The site that has to look serious
The first thing a client checks before replying.
Before a tender, a partnership or a first meeting, somebody opens your website on a phone. It is usually the only part of your operation a stranger can inspect, and it is judged in seconds.
- —Both languages, with a proper editing workflow for each
- —Redirects so existing links and rankings survive
- —Analytics and search console configured, not just installed
- —Forms that reach a person and are logged somewhere
A site somebody built years ago, on a platform nobody remembers the password for, where the Arabic version stopped being updated. The migration matters as much as the design: URLs, content and search rankings all have to survive the move.
Where the work actually happens
A form is easy. A queue behind it is the product.
- —Applicant and enrolment management with status visible to both sides
- —Document upload, validation and review queues
- —Supplier and member directories with qualification workflows
- —Role-based access so reviewers see only their own queue
- —Notifications that tell applicants where they stand
- —An export the operations team can actually work from
Ask this before you build one: who reads the submissions, on what day, and what happens to the ones they reject? If nobody can answer, the portal will become a mailbox nobody opens.
Training that a regulator will accept
The LMS is the easy part. The evidence is the point.
Academies and training operators rarely need a platform on its own. They need an applicant to become a learner, a learner to have attendance, and all of it to produce evidence when an accreditor asks.
- —Moodle LMS deployed with full Arabic support
- —Applicant and enrolment management portal
- —Barcode-driven attendance capture
- —The institutional website alongside it
It is open source, it has genuine Arabic support, it can be hosted wherever your data must live, and the certificate and reporting modules satisfy most accreditation requirements without custom work. When a client needs something Moodle cannot do, we build alongside it rather than replacing it.
National Construction Academy · see page 15
What a Saudi checkout has to carry
The cart is not where you lose them.
Abandonment in this market is usually a payment problem, not a design problem. If a buyer's preferred method is missing at checkout, the rest of the store does not matter.
- —Storefronts wired to real inventory, not a separate list
- —Checkout carrying the methods the audience actually uses
- —Compliant tax invoicing on completed orders
- —Bilingual product content, including right-to-left layouts
- —Reconciliation so finance can match payouts to orders
A store is only finished when stock, pricing, invoicing and delivery agree with each other. Where a client already runs an ERP, we connect the storefront to it rather than letting the shop keep a second, disagreeing set of numbers.
The methods a Saudi checkout is expected to carry. Which of these a given store needs depends on its basket size and audience — we scope that before integrating.
Where money makes software hard
Payments fail in ways ordinary software does not.
A double-charged customer is not a bug report, it is a refund, a complaint and a trust problem. Payment work is judged on the paths nobody demonstrates: the timeout, the retry, the duplicate, the callback that arrives twice.
- —Every payment attempt logged with its provider reference
- —Idempotency keys on anything that can be retried
- —A reconciliation report from the first day, not month three
- —Test coverage on the failure paths, not only the happy one
We built a high-volume payment aggregator on cloud infrastructure, integrating wallet providers and handling concurrent transaction load — the engineering that has to hold when traffic arrives all at once rather than one demo at a time.
Pay-Sol · see page 17
The cheapest conversion work available
Your visitor is on a phone, on mobile data, in a hurry.
Most sites are designed on a fast laptop over office wifi and experienced on a mid-range phone somewhere with two bars. The gap between those two is where a lot of enquiries quietly disappear.
- —The site on a mid-range phone, not only a laptop
- —Both language versions — Arabic can carry a different weight
- —The pages people actually land on, not just the home page
- —What happens on a slow connection, not only a fast one
Performance claims are easy to make and easy to check, which is why we hand over the measurements rather than the adjectives. Speed is also a ranking factor, so this page and the next are the same conversation.
Search engines, and now answer engines
Half your buyers will never see your site.
They will ask an assistant, read the answer, and act on it. Whether your business appears in that answer depends on things you can control — and on structure most sites do not have.
- —Technical foundation: speed, indexability, clean URLs
- —Bilingual pairing so each language ranks in its own market
- —Pages built around the questions buyers actually type
- —Local presence for the cities you actually serve
- —Structured data so machines can read what you do
- —Direct, quotable answers rather than brochure prose
- —Content specific enough to be worth citing
- —Consistency across every place your business is listed
- —Audit first, in writing, with the issues ranked by impact
- —Fix the technical foundation before touching content
- —Then the pages that map to real commercial intent
- —Re-audit on a cycle — we run thirteen on our own site so far
People search in dialect, in Modern Standard Arabic, and in transliterated English — often for the same thing. Ranking in one does not deliver the others, and translating your English keywords produces phrases nobody types.
Required in public work, right everywhere else
If it only works with a mouse and good eyes.
Government and institutional work in the Kingdom increasingly carries accessibility requirements. Beyond compliance, it is the same work that makes a site usable on a cracked phone screen in bright sunlight.
Accessibility is a continuum, not a badge. We build to the recognised standard, test what can be tested automatically, review the rest by hand, and tell you plainly which items are met and which need a decision. Any supplier who promises full compliance without seeing your content is guessing.
The sample you can inspect yourself
Open it on your phone before you call us.
Every web supplier shows portfolio screenshots. Screenshots hide load time, mirroring bugs and the state of the Arabic. Ours is a live site you can open, switch languages on, and judge in a minute.
- —Switch to Arabic and watch the whole layout mirror
- —Check how fast it loads on mobile data
- —Look at a form, an error state, a legal page — the unglamorous parts
- —Try to find a screen where the Arabic was forgotten
This is our own site, not a client deployment. We include it because it is the one piece of our work you can examine without asking anyone's permission — including the small things, like a phone number that stays the right way round inside an Arabic sentence.
National Construction Academy
Applications, learning and attendance, joined up.
- ·Applications handled outside any system
- ·No single place for course delivery
- ·Attendance recorded on paper
- ·An institutional presence that needed rebuilding
- ·Moodle LMS deployed with full Arabic support
- ·Applicant and enrolment management portal
- ·Barcode-driven attendance capture
- ·Institutional website with bilingual content
- ·Applicants apply, and are tracked, in one place
- ·Course delivery and materials live in the LMS
- ·Attendance is scanned rather than transcribed
- ·Arabic is native to the platform, not bolted on
Training operators rarely need one product; they need three that agree with each other. The value was in the joins — applicant to learner to attendance record — not in any single piece.
A directory is only useful if it is qualified.
- ·No structured way to present qualified suppliers
- ·Achievements scattered rather than showcased
- ·Buyers with no reliable way to find the right supplier
- ·A supplier directory with qualification structure
- ·An achievement showcase for credibility
- ·Matching between requirement and supplier
- ·Arabic support across the platform
- ·Suppliers are presented consistently, not ad hoc
- ·Buyers can search rather than ask around
- ·The platform is maintainable by the client's team
Directories look simple and are not. The hard parts are qualification rules, keeping entries current, and making search return something useful rather than everything.
High volume, where the edge cases live.
- ·Multiple payment providers, each with its own interface
- ·High transaction volume arriving in bursts
- ·Failure paths — timeouts, retries, duplicates — carrying real money
- ·A payment aggregator presenting one interface over several providers
- ·Wallet provider integrations for the local market
- ·Cloud infrastructure sized for concurrent load
- ·Handling for the retry and duplicate paths
- ·Payment engineering under real throughput
- ·Correctness where a mistake is a refund, not a bug
- ·Integration across providers with differing behaviour
This work was delivered outside the Kingdom, and we say so — the transferable part is the engineering discipline that payments demand, not a claim about Saudi provider integrations.
Web work, without the redesign spiral
Launch the site. Then improve it with evidence.
Web projects go wrong in a predictable way: months of design revisions before anything is live, and then no appetite left to change what the data says is wrong. We push to launch and keep budget for what comes after.
What must this site cause to happen — enquiries, applications, orders? Everything after is judged against that.
Content and navigation before visuals. Most sites that "look wrong" are structured wrong, and no amount of styling fixes it.
Every page reviewed in Arabic and English before it is called done. This is the step that gets skipped and then costs double.
Live with analytics and search console working from day one, then improve what the numbers actually point at.
The code, the content, the domain and the accounts — in your own name, not ours. If you replace us, you take the site with you. We have inherited too many projects held hostage by a supplier's hosting account to do that to anyone.
- —When a redesign is being used to avoid a positioning problem
- —When nobody will own the content after launch
- —When the real requirement is a system, not a website
- —When the timeline only works by skipping the Arabic review
The next step