Emirates · United Arab Emirates

Custom website development in Dubai Marina

A template is the right answer more often than developers like to admit. This page is about the times it is not — when the thing your business does has a shape no theme author anticipated, and forcing it into one costs more in permanent workarounds than building it properly would have cost once. For Dubai Marina businesses, quoted in AED from $200, typically live in 10 days.

What custom website development includes for a Dubai Marina business

Fixed scope, agreed in writing before development starts. From $200, typically live in 10 days.

The terms for a Emirati client

Starting price From $200, quoted and invoiced in AED
Typical timeline 10 days once content is supplied
Tax position VAT at 5%; my invoices are imported services under the reverse charge
Data protection Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021, plus DIFC or ADGM rules if you are in a free zone — resolved by a DPA that names the processing location, which the DIFC regime in particular expects to see
Payment rails available Stripe, Network International, Telr, and Tabby for instalments
My day in Dubai Marina time 08:00–17:00 — about 8 hours of overlap

Why this matters for United Arab Emirates specifically

Arabic and English side by side is the norm rather than the exception here, and retrofitting right-to-left layout after a build is far more expensive than planning for it on day one. I scope UAE sites bilingual from the start or not at all.

Accessibility on a Dubai Marina build, and why it is not optional

Keyboard navigation, real contrast ratios, form labels that are actually associated with their inputs, and alt text that describes rather than repeats. None of it is expensive when built in from the start and all of it is expensive to retrofit, which is the entire argument for doing it in the first pass.

The commercial case is simpler than the legal one: a site that a screen reader can navigate is a site that a search engine can parse, because both are reading the same semantic structure. Accessibility work and technical SEO overlap far more than either discipline usually admits, and in Dubai Marina the same build serves both.

Hospitality and venues in Dubai Marina

Restaurants, cafés, hotels and venues are judged on four things a visitor looks for immediately: today's opening hours, the menu or rate as a readable page, real photographs of the actual room, and how to book. Everything else on a hospitality site is decoration arranged around those four.

The PDF menu deserves its own warning. It is invisible to search engines, unreadable on a phone without pinch-zoom, and it is the most common reason a Dubai Marina venue never appears for searches naming the dishes it serves. Menus belong in HTML.

A redesign that quietly deleted the rankings

The classic disaster: a new site launches, looks far better, and organic enquiries fall off a cliff within a fortnight. The cause is almost always identical — the URLs changed and nothing was redirected, so every page that had accumulated years of authority now returns a 404.

Preventing it is a redirect map built before launch: every old URL to its closest new equivalent with a 301, and anything without an equivalent pointed at the nearest relevant page rather than the homepage. If your Dubai Marina site is being redesigned by anyone, ask to see that map. If it does not exist, that is the entire risk in one document.

What I am not claiming about Dubai Marina

Custom website development in Dubai Marina — common questions

Will the site actually rank in Dubai Marina search results?
The build handles what is technically controllable: crawlable HTML, correct headings, structured data, fast pages, a clean sitemap and Search Console set up on day one. Ranking also depends on your competitors, your domain's age and the links pointing at you, which no developer controls. Anyone guaranteeing a position is guessing or lying.
What happens if I am not happy with the result?
Work is delivered in milestones against a written scope, and you review each one on a staging URL before it is paid for. If the delivered milestone does not match the scope, it gets corrected before anything moves forward. That structure exists so disagreement is resolved at the stage it happens rather than at the end when it is expensive.
Do you build on WordPress or something custom?
Whichever the project justifies. WordPress when you need to edit content constantly and want a familiar admin. A static build when speed and security matter more than a plugin ecosystem. Custom PHP and MySQL when the logic is genuinely yours. The choice is explained in the quote with its trade-offs, not presented as a foregone conclusion.
Can you migrate my Dubai Marina site without losing rankings?
Yes, and the redirect map is the whole job. Every existing URL is mapped to its new equivalent with a 301 before launch, and anything with no equivalent goes to the closest relevant page rather than the homepage. Sites lose rankings in migration because that mapping was skipped, not because migration is inherently risky.
How long does a Dubai Marina project actually take?
Three days for a business site, seven for a store, ten for a custom application. That holds because the process is fixed rather than improvised and because your content exists on day one. What stretches a build is almost never the code — it is waiting for copy, logos and photographs, so those are requested before the clock starts.
What hours will you be available to us in Dubai Marina?
My working day lands at 08:00–17:00 in your time, which is roughly 8 hours inside a normal Dubai Marina working day. In practice you can raise something in the morning and have it answered the same morning, and a scheduled call is easy to place at a civilised hour for both of us.
Can you fix my existing site rather than rebuild it?
Often, yes, and it is usually the cheaper answer. Speed problems, a broken mobile layout, a form that silently fails or missing structured data are all fixable on the site you already have. I will tell you which of the two you need after looking, and a rebuild only gets recommended when the fix would cost more than starting again.

Related pages

Other services in Dubai Marina

Custom website development in nearby Emirates towns

The full service detail — process, deliverables, what is excluded and the FAQ — is on the main custom website development page. Everything I build for Dubai Marina is on the Dubai Marina page, and every town in United Arab Emirates is on the United Arab Emirates coverage page.

Custom website development in Dubai Marina — get a fixed quote

Send the brief and you get a reply within one business day, priced in AED from $200. If custom website development is not what your project actually needs, I will say so.

Response
Replies within 1 business day
Hours
Mon–Fri, 09:00–18:00 PKT — overlaps 05:00–14:00 UK, 00:00–09:00 US Eastern
Booking
Booking projects from October 2026
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