Abu Dhabi websites built for sign-off in two languages

Official figures for the third quarter of 2025 put non-oil activity at 54 percent of Abu Dhabi's GDP, and name construction, real estate, transport and storage, finance and insurance, and manufacturing among the sectors behind the growth. If you sell to government entities or national companies, procurement is part of the brief. The UAE's National In-Country Value program, run by the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology, directs their purchasing toward the UAE economy, and ADNOC, Mubadala, and Aldar are among its partners.

Two other groups have distinct needs. ADGM, the international financial center on Al Maryah and Al Reem islands, applies English common law, has its own courts, and is home to asset managers, fintech companies, and professional services firms. Hub71 connects startups with investors and partners in the capital. On Saadiyat, Zayed National Museum opened in December 2025 and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is scheduled to open in the same cultural district on 11 December 2026, so exhibition, venue, and hospitality launches keep arriving.

When a site has to pass a procurement panel, a compliance officer, or a board before customers see it, we plan for that: a sitemap and copy deck that can be approved one section at a time, claims backed by evidence, and technical documentation your IT team keeps after handover.

No single privacy regime covers every Abu Dhabi website. Onshore companies come under the federal Personal Data Protection Law, Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021. It expects consent to be clear, simple, and unambiguous, and it lets people withdraw consent at any time. The law does not apply to government entities' own processing, to health and banking data covered by their own legislation, or to free zones with their own data protection laws.

ADGM is one of those free zones. Its Data Protection Regulations 2021 are modeled on the GDPR and supervised by ADGM's own Office of Data Protection. Healthcare facilities regulated by the Department of Health, public and private, must meet ADHICS, the emirate's healthcare information and cyber security standard, which is also a condition for connecting to the Malaffi health information exchange.

Sites that sell to consumers have one more layer. The UAE Consumer Protection Law reaches e-commerce when the supplier is registered in the UAE, and its executive regulations require information, advertisements, and consumer contracts in Arabic, with other languages allowed alongside. Sellers must also protect consumer data and not use it for promotional or marketing purposes. Before design starts, we map every form, cookie, analytics tag, and third-party script to the rules that apply, then prepare notice and consent text in both languages for your legal adviser to approve.

Arabic is the UAE's official language and English is widely used, with Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Tagalog, and Bengali also commonly spoken. Abu Dhabi residents already handle government services online through TAMM, signing in once with UAE PASS. We treat that as the benchmark for a private site's Arabic version: a complete service that works on a phone, not a translated brochure.

We deliver Arabic and English sites, and multilingual ones when your audience needs a third language. The Arabic version gets its own right-to-left layout, mirrored navigation and directional icons, Arabic typefaces chosen for reading on screen, and language-tagged URLs so search engines show people the right version. We agree early on who writes, translates, and approves each language, because that step usually sets the launch date.

If you are building for a federal entity, the UAE's National Digital Accessibility Policy sets WCAG 2.1 level AA as the target. We treat contrast, keyboard navigation, form labels, and screen reader behavior in both languages as design requirements from the first wireframes, not as a check after launch.

Property advertising in the emirate needs a Madhmoun permit, issued through the Abu Dhabi Real Estate Centre's DARI platform for website listings and for social media campaigns. Permits run for set periods, and advertising with an expired permit is a violation. Property on Al Maryah and Al Reem islands falls under ADGM, which issues its own permits in collaboration with Madhmoun. A developer or broker site therefore needs listing templates with fields for permit details and a simple way to take a listing down when its permit lapses. Serene Tower and ZEM Builders were built for real estate clients in Pakistan, not the UAE. What carries over is the structure: project atlases, unit journeys, and construction evidence.

For retail, the Tajer Abu Dhabi licence lets entrepreneurs operate without physical premises for their first three years, and in September 2026 ADDED extended that period by a year for holders whose term ends in 2026. For these businesses the website can be the storefront from the first day. If you plan to offer buy now, pay later, the Central Bank has regulated it as short-term credit since 27 December 2023, so choose a licensed provider. Aani instant payments and the Jaywan domestic card, both run by Central Bank subsidiary Al Etihad Payments, were added to the Ministry of Finance's payment channels in August 2026; ask your payment provider which of them it supports. Our nearest commerce example is The Closet, a fashion storefront for a client in Qatar.

B2B platforms have fixed deadlines. Under the UAE's e-invoicing rollout, businesses with revenue of AED 50 million or more must appoint an Accredited Service Provider by 30 October 2026 and go live on 1 January 2027. Smaller businesses follow on 1 July 2027 and government entities on 1 October 2027. Consumer (B2C) invoices are out of scope for now. If your portal issues B2B invoices, the connection to that provider belongs in the first technical plan. GWC Directory, a logistics directory platform we built for a Qatar client, shows how we keep a large B2B network easy to search as it grows. For ADGM firms explaining a specialist service, Docusafe, a corporate technology site, is the closer reference.