Overview
Dubai Holding manages a $150 billion portfolio of destination, retail, hospitality, and residential brands across 30+ countries. In late 2023 they hired me directly to support the migration of their digital portfolio from Sitefinity/.NET to Webflow Enterprise.
Over two years I designed and built the component libraries that multiple marketing teams used to create and run their websites, and led high-stakes redesigns and SEO migrations for properties like Dubai Holding and Visit Hatta. Those libraries still power their sites today. In this Webflow Conf talk, Dmytro Yevdokymov, who strategized the migration, walks through how the system scaled across the organization:
The Challenge
Tens of enterprise websites had to be rebuilt, each with its own brand, content model, and stakeholders. Treating them as standalone projects wasn't an option.
Multiple Teams, Different Brands
Every brand had its own identity and marketing team. One-off builds would be slow, inconsistent, and painful to maintain.
Years of SEO Equity at Risk
These were migrations, not launches. Each property carried years of rankings and domain authority that had to survive the rebuild.
Bilingual and Accessibility Requirements
Destination sites needed native Arabic/English with full RTL. Retail properties required WCAG AA compliance.
The Approach
The leverage at this scale was architectural: build a shared component library once, engineered to accommodate different brand expressions. Each property inherits the system's structural decisions while expressing its own identity through color, typography, logo, and content. One system, many surfaces.
Three decisions shaped the engagement:
- Build the system first, then the sites. Every property migration after the first becomes assembly rather than rebuild, with components synced to a single source of truth.
- Encode the non-negotiables at the component level. WCAG AA, RTL support, and performance patterns are baked into the components, so no page-level decision can break them.
- Enable marketing teams to own their properties. CMS architecture that lets each team publish and iterate without developer support.
Each component had two levels of control: library-level settings synced across every property, and site-level variables for per-property customization. The same hero pattern worked across brands with a swap of color, logo, and content. The same navigation rendered LTR in English or RTL in Arabic. The same card grid handled retail listings, tourism attractions, or hospitality properties depending on the CMS behind it.
In Practice: Dubai Holding Company Website
The corporate site for one of the UAE's largest investment groups: multilingual, component-driven, and built for enterprise content flexibility.
Homepage
About
Businesses
Sustainability
In Practice: Visit Hatta Website
The official site for Dubai's largest nature reserve, serving 350,000+ visitors per season. It needed a bilingual experience that felt equally native in English and Arabic, without losing organic traffic in the migration.
English homepage
Arabic homepage with RTL layout
Activities page
Navigation menu
In Practice: Nad Al Sheba Mall Component Library
The Nakheel Malls team required WCAG AA across their retail sites, so accessibility was built into every component. Sites sharing the library inherit it by default.
Nad Al Sheba Mall Homepage
Circle Mall Homepage
WCAG AA conformance verified
In Practice: TECOM Group Component Library
TECOM operates ten business districts under the Dubai Holding ecosystem, and it was the strongest test of the system's scalability: ten distinct properties, one shared library. Every new district migration shipped faster than the last because the structural problems had already been absorbed.
Dubai Media City
D/Quarters
Outcome
Portfolio-Wide Component Library
Shared libraries powering retail and destination properties, still in active use by Dubai Holding's teams today.
Zero SEO Regression
Every migration launched without losing organic rankings, preserving years of accumulated domain authority.
Accessibility as Default
WCAG AA achieved across retail properties, encoded into the library so future sites inherit it automatically.
Reflection
At enterprise scale, the highest-leverage work is invisible: the architectural decisions encoded into the system shape every page built afterward, long after you've moved on. When those decisions are right, each new property gets easier, teams ship independently, accessibility holds, and SEO survives. That's what these two years were really about.