Web design for the UAE in Arabic and English

Arabic is the official language under Article 7 of the UAE constitution, and the UAE Embassy in Washington describes English and Arabic as the two most widely spoken languages, noting that Urdu, Hindi and Pashtu are also heard. The US International Trade Administration's UAE e-commerce guide notes that luxury brands launched Arabic sites to reach shoppers who had avoided buying online because of language. A UAE business website often has to serve both groups, and each notices when its version was an afterthought.

We deliver Arabic, English and multilingual sites with right-to-left layouts treated as their own reading experience, not a mirrored copy. That means setting text direction in the markup rather than in CSS, as the W3C recommends, using logical start and end spacing so navigation, forms, sliders and directional icons flip correctly, and choosing Arabic typefaces that stay readable at small sizes on phones. Each language gets its own URLs with hreflang annotations, because Google recommends separate URLs over cookie or browser-based language switching, so both versions can be indexed. Before design starts, we agree who writes, reviews and approves the Arabic copy.

Cabinet Decision 66 of 2023, the executive regulation of the Consumer Protection Law, has an article written for e-commerce sellers. As each product requires, the seller must show producer and importer details, specifications, country of origin, use and storage terms, and return and replacement terms, attach a detailed specification statement in the product's original language plus Arabic, and place a conformity mark on the website page. The same regulation requires sellers to state clearly whether debit cards are accepted, bars extra charges for paying by credit card, and requires prior permission from the competent authority before discounts and promotions are advertised.

Those rules change how a store should be modelled. We set up product data so Arabic specifications, origin and return terms are structured fields rather than text pasted into a description, and we build campaign banners and discount rules so they go live only once the permit is in hand. Your legal adviser confirms the wording; the store makes it easy to publish correctly in both languages.

Checkout should reflect how UAE customers pay. Stripe's UAE guide identifies credit cards as the leading e-commerce payment method, says digital wallets are popular, and notes that cash on delivery is still used although declining. Under the central bank's finance companies regulation, buy now, pay later counts as short-term credit that only licensed banks and finance companies, or their agents with central bank approval, may offer, so instalment options should come through a licensed provider. Aani, the central bank's instant-payment platform operated by Al Etihad Payments, began reaching online checkouts through a merchant pilot in late 2025. Our Gulf e-commerce reference is The Closet, a fashion storefront for a client in Qatar, built around mobile-first product discovery.

In its first-quarter 2026 figures, the Dubai Land Department classed AED 148.35 billion of the AED 173 billion invested in the emirate's real estate as foreign investment, so a project site has to work for buyers of many nationalities, in English as well as Arabic. The department's Madmoun service issues a QR code for every Trakheesi advertising permit, and real estate companies must show that code on all real estate advertisements, visual or written.

For a developer or brokerage, that means listing and project templates with a place for the permit number and QR code, unit pages that work in Arabic and English, and enquiry forms that route into a CRM rather than a shared inbox. Our real estate launch work so far has been for developers in Pakistan: Serene Tower in DHA Multan, the ZEM Builders project atlas, and 360 The Residences. The same patterns, from scroll-led project stories and unit journeys to construction evidence and direct enquiry paths, carry over to a UAE launch once Dubai's permit display and the Arabic version are added.

Federal Decree-Law 45 of 2021, the Personal Data Protection Law, covers personal data of people in the UAE whether the controller or processor sits inside or outside the country, bars processing without consent except in listed cases, and sets conditions for transfers abroad. DIFC and ADGM run their own data protection regimes, and a 2026 Chambers guide notes that the federal law's implementing regulations have yet to be issued and that most organisations run compliance through internal risk assessments. Because we work from Islamabad, we set up forms, analytics and CRM connections in accounts your business owns, collect only the fields you need, and add consent controls and a privacy notice that your adviser matches to mainland, DIFC or ADGM rules.

The National Digital Accessibility Policy guides federal government entities to meet WCAG 2.1 at level AA, and the UAE government design system follows the same standard. The policy is written for government, but it gives private businesses a locally recognised benchmark, and we can scope and test a build against it in both languages.

E-invoicing is arriving for business-to-business and business-to-government trade. Under Ministerial Decisions 243 and 244 of 2025, as amended in 2026, businesses with revenue of AED 50 million or more must appoint an accredited service provider by 30 October 2026 and implement e-invoicing by 1 January 2027; smaller businesses follow on 1 July 2027 and government entities on 1 October 2027. Transactions with consumers are excluded until the Minister decides otherwise, and e-invoice data must be stored within the UAE. A consumer-only store is out of scope for now, but a B2B ordering portal needs clean order and customer data that your ERP and provider can turn into compliant invoices, and we plan that handoff during discovery.