Searching for a "web development company in Dubai" or "website designer UAE" turns up a large field, from big regional agencies to solo freelancers — and for a UAE business, the single most useful filter question is whether they've actually built a genuine bilingual Arabic-English site before, not just added a translate widget to an English one.
Right-to-left layout is the technical tell. Ask a studio directly how they handle RTL — a studio that talks about component-level layout mirroring (navigation, icons, forms, spacing all flipping correctly) has done this properly before; one that mentions a CSS `direction: rtl` override as the whole answer usually hasn't.
Arabic content quality is worth checking independently of the studio's English pitch. If they're offering to write or source Arabic copy, ask who's actually writing it — professional Arabic copywriting reads very differently from machine-translated English, and it's one of the fastest ways a site either builds or loses trust with an Arabic-first visitor.
WhatsApp integration isn't a nice-to-have feature to ask about — it's close to a baseline expectation in the UAE market, where it's often the primary way customers actually make contact. A studio building a UAE-facing site without a first-class WhatsApp contact flow is missing something most local customers will expect by default.
For e-commerce specifically, ask about UAE-relevant payment gateway integration during the first conversation rather than assuming it's covered — this varies more by studio than people expect, and it's a cheap question to ask early compared to discovering a gap after the build is done.
The studios worth shortlisting for a Dubai or wider UAE build are the ones who ask about your audience split (Arabic-first vs English-first customers, B2B vs B2C) before quoting, rather than treating it as a standard English-site build with a translation pass added on top.