A website design brief is a short document that tells a designer what the site has to achieve, who it is for, what content already exists, and how the result will be judged. For most Dubai businesses it runs three to six pages, not thirty. The template below gives you the sections to fill in, the questions that decide whether a quote is accurate or a guess, and the bilingual and migration details UAE briefs usually miss.
Key takeaways
- A brief is a scoping document. Its job is to make two agencies quote for the same work so the prices can be compared.
- Name one business outcome and the number you will measure it by, such as qualified enquiries per month, rather than asking for a modern look.
- Content, photography and Arabic copy are the usual reason a UAE website slips by four to six weeks. Put named owners and dates against them.
- If the site is bilingual, decide whether Arabic is full parity with English or a reduced version, and who signs it off.
- Write Google’s published Core Web Vitals thresholds in as acceptance criteria: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, CLS of 0.1 or less.
- On a redesign, the old-to-new URL map and the redirect plan belong in the brief, not in the last week before launch.
What a brief decides, and what it does not
A brief fixes scope, audience, content, constraints and success measures. It does not dictate layout, colour or typography, and a brief that tries to design the site in words produces a worse site and a longer argument. You own the problem and the business facts. The designer owns the answer to it.
The practical test is whether two agencies reading your brief would quote for the same thing. A brief that says “around ten pages, modern and professional” fails it. One agency prices a five-template build with repeatable page types. Another prices ten individually designed layouts. The quotes come back far apart, and the gap has nothing to do with quality.
One issue we often see is a brief written after a parent company or an investor has already fixed the budget. If the number cannot move, say so and ask what fits inside it.
The brief skeleton you can copy
Work through these twelve sections in order. Two or three sentences each is enough for most of them.
- Company and licence. Legal name, trade licence number and issuing authority, emirate, address, main phone and WhatsApp number. These end up in the footer and in your structured data, so give them once and correctly.
- What the business sells, in the words a customer would use. A facilities management company in Al Quoz writes the four services that produce most of the revenue and drops the rest to a list.
- The one outcome the site has to produce in twelve months, with a number attached. Twenty qualified enquiries a month, or forty online orders a week.
- Audiences, ranked. Most UAE B2B sites serve two or three: the buyer searching on a phone, the procurement contact who wants a company profile PDF, and the existing client hunting for a phone number.
- What visitors should be able to do, in order of value: book a site visit, request a quote, pay a deposit.
- Page list with page types, grouped, so a designer can see that thirty service pages share one template and only the homepage and contact page are unique.
- Content status. Per page, say whether the copy exists, needs rewriting or does not exist, who owns it, and the delivery date.
- Languages. English only, English plus Arabic at full parity, or a reduced Arabic site. Name who approves the Arabic.
- Brand assets you hold: logo files and formats, colours, fonts and licences, photography, and whether an Arabic wordmark exists.
- Systems the site must talk to. CRM, accounting software, a booking engine, a payment gateway, WhatsApp Business, or a property listings feed.
- Constraints. Hosting you cannot move, a head office IT policy, a launch tied to an exhibition date.
- Budget range, decision date, target launch date, and which of the three is genuinely fixed.
Our note on the stages of website development maps the same information onto a project timeline.
The questions agencies wish clients answered first
These are the gaps that turn a fixed quote into a variation order.
- Who signs off, and whether that person can approve alone. Three equal decision-makers with no tiebreaker adds revision rounds nobody costed.
- Who holds the domain registrar login, the DNS, the hosting account and the analytics property. Often it is a former employee or an agency that no longer replies.
- Which existing pages actually produce enquiries. Pull twelve months from Google Analytics before the brief is written, not after the old site is switched off.
- What must not change. A working booking engine, an ERP integration, a phone number printed on a fleet of vans.
- What the business will do with the leads. Forty enquiries a month is a problem if nobody answers the phone on Saturday.
- What “done” means for payment. Design approved, code delivered, content loaded, or live and passing an agreed set of checks.
Bilingual and RTL work belongs in the brief, not the build
Arabic is the section most briefs skip, and retrofitting it costs more than planning it. Full parity means every page exists in both languages and every future page is written twice. A reduced Arabic site, typically the homepage, the service overviews and contact, suits a company whose buyers work in English but whose brand needs to read as local.
On the technical side, the W3C is explicit that direction is markup, not styling. Its guidance on the dir attribute says to put dir=”rtl” on the html element for a right-to-left document and warns against setting direction in CSS, because directional information affects the meaning of the content and has to survive when the stylesheet does not load. It also recommends logical properties such as start and end instead of left and right, so one stylesheet serves both directions.
Three more details belong in the brief. Decide whether numerals appear as Western or Arabic-Indic digits, because mixing them across a price list looks careless. Decide whether the Arabic site keeps the brand name in Latin script, which most Dubai companies do. And check that your English font has an Arabic companion licensed for web use, since pairing a licensed Latin face with a default system Arabic is the usual reason a bilingual site looks off balance.
For reference patterns, the UAE Design System published by the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority shows how federal entities handle bilingual navigation, forms and component mirroring. You are not obliged to follow it, but it settles arguments between an Arabic reviewer and a designer.
There is a legal dimension too. Federal Law No. 15 of 2020 on Consumer Protection requires consumer-facing data, advertising and contracts to be in Arabic, with other languages permitted alongside it. The current texts sit on the Ministry of Economy and Tourism legislation page; confirm the version in force for your activity.
Content is what delays UAE website projects
Design rarely holds a project up. Copy does. One issue we often see is a brief listing eighteen pages with a launch date four weeks out and no named content owner, which reliably becomes a twelve-week project.
Handle it with a spreadsheet attached to the brief: one row per page, with columns for URL, page type, owner, status, reviewer and delivery date. If you run a clinic in Jumeirah, the medical review of treatment pages is a real step with a real queue, and it belongs on that sheet.
Photography deserves its own line. Real photographs of your premises, team and completed work beat stock images of handshakes. If you will use licensed images, state who buys the licence and at what size. Case studies need permission in writing, and a contractor naming a developer client should have that agreement before the page is designed around it. Our list of website design mistakes Dubai businesses should avoid covers several content traps that follow from skipping this step.
Performance and measurement targets to write into the brief
Turn quality into numbers the developer can test against. Google’s Core Web Vitals give you three. According to web.dev, a good result is Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, each assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads across mobile and desktop. INP became a stable Core Web Vital in 2024, replacing First Input Delay.
Add two conditions. First, that the thresholds are judged on real user data rather than one lab run on an office connection, because a Lighthouse score of 98 on a desktop in Dubai Internet City says little about a customer on a phone in a basement car park. Second, a page weight budget of roughly 1.5 MB for a service page.
Then define the measurement. Name the analytics platform, list the conversion events with their exact names, and say who owns the tag manager container. Sites launch without this, and three months of data disappear.
On a redesign, brief the migration
If a site already exists, the brief has to cover what happens to its URLs. Google’s site move documentation sets out the method: use server side permanent redirects such as 301 or 308, map old URLs to new ones starting from your sitemaps, server logs and analytics, update internal links and canonical tags, and submit a new sitemap in Search Console. Google advises keeping redirects for at least one year, and says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs replace the old ones in results.
Two practical additions. Export the full URL list and twelve months of search performance data before the old site is decommissioned, because you cannot rebuild that mapping from memory. And agree who is accountable for rankings in the first six weeks after launch, since some movement is normal. If organic traffic matters to you, involving whoever handles your SEO in Dubai at the brief stage is the cheaper order of operations.
Compliance details a Dubai brief should name
Figures and rules here are indicative and change. This article is general information, not legal or tax advice, so confirm the current position with a qualified adviser.
- Displayed prices. Article 38 of Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017 provides that in the case of a taxable supply the published prices shall be inclusive of tax, with a narrow exception where the price is clearly identified as exclusive. If your site shows prices, decide how VAT appears on product pages, in the cart and on the invoice.
- Seller disclosure. The consumer protection rules for online selling expect a UAE-registered e-commerce provider to give its name, legal status, address and licensing details, plus the terms of contracting, payment and warranty, in Arabic. Reserve space in the footer and the checkout for it.
- Personal data. Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data took effect in January 2022 and makes consent the primary basis for processing, requiring it to be specific, informed and withdrawable. On a website that means a real consent line on forms, a privacy policy describing what you actually do, and a cookie mechanism that works.
- Accessibility. The UAE National Policy for Digital Accessibility, issued in March 2024, sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the conformance bar for federal government websites and apps. Private companies sit outside its scope, but the same standard makes a sound acceptance criterion.
Scoring proposals against the brief
Read the replies against the brief rather than against each other. The table below is the shortlist we use when a client asks us to review proposals.
| Brief section | What a strong proposal answers | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| Page list and templates | Names the page types, the number of unique designs, and what is repeated | A page count with no template breakdown |
| Content | States who writes what, and what happens to the timeline if content is late | Content described as client supplied, with no date or consequence |
| Arabic | Separate line items for translation, RTL layout work and Arabic proofing | Arabic folded into the design fee as a single word |
| Performance | Accepts measurable targets and says how they will be tested | Fast and optimised, with no metric |
| Migration | Includes URL mapping, redirects and a post-launch monitoring window | Redirects mentioned only in a support package |
| Ownership | Says who owns the code, the design files and the accounts after final payment | Silence, or a licence that ends when the retainer does |
