Dubai has more web agencies than any buyer can evaluate, and the portfolios all look the same. The differences show up after the contract, and almost all of them can be found beforehand with four questions.
Ask for live links, not portfolio images
A grid of screenshots tells you nothing about performance, nothing about how the site behaves on a phone, and nothing about whether it is still online. Ask for URLs. Open them on your own phone on mobile data. If a site takes five seconds to become useful, you have learned something no case study would have told you.
An agency that cannot produce live links has a reason, and it is not confidentiality.
Ask who owns what
The code, the domain, the hosting account, the analytics property. The correct answer is you, in writing, before the first invoice. An agency holding your domain "to simplify management" is selling a dependency, and unwinding it later is slow and unpleasant.
Ask what happens when something breaks
Every project has incidents. What separates a serious partner is a written answer: who responds, within how long, what counts as a defect covered at no cost, and what is billable. Without that document you do not have support, you have goodwill, and goodwill has no response time.
Ask how they handle Arabic
Even if you are launching in English first. The answer tells you how they think about layout. A team that treats Arabic as a translation layer will build something that has to be rebuilt when you expand, and in this market you will expand.
What a fair proposal contains
- Unique screen count, not page count. Ten pages sharing one template is not ten designs.
- Deliverables per phase, with acceptance criteria.
- How many revision rounds are included and what is billed beyond them.
- Code ownership and a defect warranty period.
- Maintenance terms with a stated response time.
Unlimited revisions is not generosity, it is an undefined scope, and undefined scope is how projects stall.
On price
Three quotes with three different totals are usually three different projects. Compare what is inside them, line by line, and the gap almost always turns out to be scope rather than margin. The cheapest quote is frequently the most expensive outcome, because a template with filler content has to be redone within a year, and the rebuild has to recover the search visibility the first attempt never earned.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a corporate website take?
Six to ten weeks from design approval for a serious bilingual build. The single biggest cause of slippage is content, not engineering.
Local agency or offshore team?
Local matters for language quality, market knowledge and being awake during your launch window. Offshore can work well for capacity, but someone accountable needs to be in your time zone when something goes wrong.
