A website your team can update in English and Arabic without calling a developer.

The CMS decision is usually made too quickly. Teams pick a platform because a previous agency used it or because a competitor does, then discover years later that editing Arabic pages is painful, that every new page type needs a developer, or that licence and hosting costs have grown beyond what the site earns. We start with who will edit the site, how often, in which languages, with what approval steps, and which systems it needs to talk to.

For many UAE businesses, WordPress remains the practical choice: familiar to editors, quick to extend and cheap to host well. A headless CMS such as Strapi suits teams that want a fast Next.js front end, content reused across a website and an app, or tighter control over structure. Sitecore fits larger organisations that need personalisation and enterprise governance, and SharePoint suits intranets and sites that sit inside a Microsoft 365 estate. We have no licence to sell, so the recommendation follows your needs.

Bilingual editing is where most CMS projects in this market succeed or fail. We set up Arabic and English as linked versions of the same content, so editors can see which pages are missing a translation, and we build templates that switch cleanly to right to left with proper Arabic typography. Editors get structured fields rather than one large text box, which keeps layouts intact when Arabic text runs longer or shorter than English. Approval workflows let marketing draft, legal or compliance review, and a manager publish.

A UAE site usually needs WhatsApp enquiry buttons, forms that route leads to your CRM, and campaign landing pages that marketing can create before Ramadan, Eid or a product launch without waiting for development. Personal data collected through forms should be handled with the UAE PDPL in mind, and government or regulated organisations may have hosting requirements we suggest confirming early.

Before discovery, it helps to gather a few things: an export or inventory of your current pages, analytics showing which pages people actually visit, the names of everyone who edits content today and what frustrates them, and a list of the systems the site must talk to, such as a CRM, booking tool, careers portal or ERP. If you have brand guidelines in both languages, bring them too. Those inputs let us design a content model around real use rather than around a sitemap that looks tidy on paper.

A mistake we see often is migrating every old page into the new CMS unchanged, including duplicates, outdated offers and thin pages nobody reads. Another is building dozens of one off templates, which looks flexible at launch and becomes impossible to maintain within a year. We review content with you before migration, merge or retire what no longer earns its place, and build a smaller set of flexible components that editors can combine. Redirects from old URLs are planned at the same time, so search visibility and existing links are protected.

Codeeo's web team works from Dubai Silicon Oasis, part of 80+ people across Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi. We train your editors in person or on video, and support continues after launch on WhatsApp.