Building a website or software for a UAE business with a team in India

It depends on where your company is licensed. Mainland businesses fall under the federal Personal Data Protection Law, Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021, which the UAE government portal says came into force on 2 January 2022. Companies set up in the Dubai International Financial Centre have their own regime, DIFC Law No. 5 of 2020, and the Abu Dhabi Global Market free zone has separate data protection rules as well. Before anyone designs your enquiry form, confirm which of these your trade licence puts you under, because it decides the consent wording, the privacy notice and what you have to say about sending data abroad.

That last point matters when your developer is in India. A contact form that stores enquiries on a server we manage, or a CRM that a team outside the UAE can open, is a transfer of personal data. Write down where the data will live and who can reach it before launch, not after. Our note on how data is handled when you add AI features covers the same question for chatbots and AI tools. As of November 2026; this is a starting point for your own legal review, not legal advice.

Translating the copy is the small part. Arabic reads right to left, so the whole layout mirrors: navigation, icons that imply direction, form labels, breadcrumbs and carousels. W3C's internationalisation guidance is specific that the base direction belongs on the html element with dir="rtl", rather than being patched with CSS alignment, and that mixed text such as a product code or an English brand name inside Arabic sentences needs its own direction handling.

In practice we build the English and Arabic versions from the same components with a direction switch, give each language its own URL so search engines index both, and test with real Arabic content rather than lorem ipsum, which hides line-length and font problems. If the Arabic site is an afterthought added to an English build, budget for rework. It is cheaper decided at the start of a business website project.

Many UAE customers would rather message than fill a form, so the enquiry path usually has a WhatsApp button next to the form, and the follow-up runs on WhatsApp too. Meta's rules apply here: outside the customer service window you can only send pre-approved template messages, and each language version of a template counts as its own template. If you reply in Arabic and English, plan and submit both.

We have written up how to build a WhatsApp chatbot and whether a chatbot can reply in more than one language; the second one is about Indian languages, but the testing approach is the same for Arabic. For lead routing, see WhatsApp automation.

We do not recommend a specific UAE payment provider here, because the right one depends on your licence, your bank and whether you sell to consumers or businesses. What we check with you early: whether the provider supports AED settlement, how refunds and chargebacks are handled, and whether card details ever touch your own server. They should not; a hosted payment page or the provider's own fields keep card data out of your site entirely.