Overview
Dubai Holding is one of the Middle East's largest holding companies, managing a $150 billion destination, retail, hospitality, and residential brands portfolio across 30+ countries. In late 2023, they hired me directly as a contractor to support a large-scale migration of their digital portfolio from their existing Sitefinity/.NET enterprise solution to Webflow Enterprise.
My work with Dubai Holding included high-stakes redesigns, rebuilds, and SEO migrations of websites like Dubai Holding and Visit Hatta. I also designed and built multiple component libraries that different marketing teams used to create and operate websites across the portfolio — libraries still powering their digital surfaces today.
Over those two years, I collaborated with marketing teams across the organization and worked directly with Dmytro Yevdokymov, who strategized the migration efforts. In the following talk from Webflow Conf, Dmytro explains how Webflow scaled across Dubai Holding and the technical challenges they overcame by migrating to this CMS.
The Challenge
Dubai Holding has a large portfolio of enterprise websites, each with its own content model, stakeholders, and brand. Tens of websites had to be rebuilt, which required a more holistic, system-driven approach than treating each as a standalone project.
Multiple Teams, Different Brands
Each brand under Dubai Holding had its own brand expression, design assets, and marketing team. Designing one-off sites for each would be slow, inconsistent, and very challenging to maintain.
Years of SEO Equity at Risk
These sites weren't launches, they were migrations. Each property carried years of organic search rankings and domain authority that required an SEO-aware rebuild to maintain.
Bilingual and Accessibility Requirements
Many destination websites required full Arabic/English support with proper RTL (right to left) layouts, and some retail properties required WCAG AA compliance.
The Approach
Treating each property as its own project was an approach that would compound inefficiency: every new property restarts the design process, every team solves the same problems independently, and the portfolio drifts toward inconsistency as it grows.
The real leverage for a project of this scale was architectural: build a shared component library once, designed 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. Invest upfront in a component library engineered for reuse. Every subsequent property migration becomes assembly rather than rebuild. Components stay synced with a single source of truth so updates roll out across many websites without manual rework.
Encode the non-negotiables at the component level. Accessibility, RTL support, and performance patterns should be impossible to break at the page level. They need to be baked into the components, while brand-level styles and variables stay controlled at the site level.
Enable the marketing teams to own their own properties. Structure the CMS so each team can publish and iterate independently, without requiring developer support for routine updates.
The Component Libraries: A Two-Level System
Each component in the libraries had two levels of control. The first level was settings managed at the component library — synced across every property using it. The second level was variables changed at the site level for full per-property customization.
This configuration ensured every component was flexible enough to meet different marketing teams' requirements while maintaining a level of control that allowed updates and enhancements to propagate across websites without manual adjustments to each one.
The same hero pattern that worked for one property could adjust to another property's brand with a swap of color, logo, and content. The same navigation could render LTR in English or RTL in Arabic. The same card grid could handle retail listings, tourism attractions, or hospitality properties depending on the CMS configuration behind it.
Key Design Decisions
Designing the System, Not the Sites
The first major decision was refusing to treat Dubai Holding as a series of one-off website projects. Every hour spent on the component library upfront saved weeks on every subsequent property migration.
Accessibility and Bilingual Support as System Foundations
The non-negotiables — WCAG AA, RTL, performance — had to be solved at the component level, not the page level. Designing these into the library's foundations meant no individual property launch could regress on them, no matter who was operating the site afterward.
SEO as a Design Consideration, Not a Post-Launch Task
With years of search equity on the line, SEO wasn't something to check at the end. Content models, URL structures, schema markup, and redirect strategies were designed into each migration from the start — in close coordination with Dubai Holding's SEO team. Every migration launched without losing ground on search rankings.
Building for Independence
The goal wasn't to make Dubai Holding's marketing teams dependent on me — it was to give them infrastructure they could operate themselves. Every CMS was designed to put content control in the team's hands, with the design system enforcing consistency in the background. Today, the teams run their properties independently — the outcome I was designing toward from the start.
In Practice: Dubai Holding Company Website
Dubai Holding's corporate website was designed to support one of the UAE's largest investment groups across hospitality, real estate, entertainment, and destination management, requiring a scalable multilingual experience, robust component architecture, and enterprise-grade content flexibility.
Homepage
About
Businesses
Sustainability
In Practice: Visit Hatta Website
Visit Hatta is the official website for Dubai's largest nature reserve, a flagship tourism property welcoming over 350,000 visitors per season. It needed to serve both English and Arabic audiences with a bilingual experience that felt equally native to each, while preserving organic traffic.
English homepage
Arabic homepage with RTL layout
Activities page
Navigation menu
In Practice: Nad Al Sheba Mall Component Library
The Nakheel Malls team — the stakeholder for the project — required WCAG AA compliance across their websites. That meant accessibility best practices had to be built into every component. While true compliance always requires manual testing, building components that were accessible by design made it possible to scale those practices across multiple retail websites sharing the same library.
Nad Al Sheba Mall Homepage
Circle Mall Homepage
WCAG AA conformance verified
In Practice: TECOM Group Component Library
TECOM Group is part of the Dubai Holding ecosystem, operating ten strategic business districts that support technology, media, education, science, and design — helping position Dubai as a global center for business and innovation.
The TECOM engagement was the strongest test of the system's scalability. Ten distinct business district properties, each with its own identity, audience, and content needs — all built from the same shared component library. Where earlier properties proved the system could handle multiple brands, TECOM proved it could handle a sub-portfolio at scale. Every new district migration moved faster than the last because the structural problems had already been absorbed.
Dubai Media City
D/Quarters
Outcome
A two-year direct engagement supporting multiple marketing teams across destination, retail, and hospitality properties.
Portfolio-Wide Component Library
Shared component libraries powering multiple retail and destination properties, still in active use by Dubai Holding's teams today.
Zero SEO Regression
Every migration launched without losing organic search rankings, preserving years of accumulated domain authority.
Accessibility as Default
WCAG AA compliance achieved across retail properties, with accessibility encoded into the component library so future sites inherit it automatically.
Reflection
The leverage at enterprise scale isn't in any individual page or component. It's in the decisions you encode into the system — the ones that affect every page that gets built afterward, often long after you've moved on.
When those decisions are right, each new property gets easier. Marketing teams ship faster. Accessibility holds. SEO survives migrations. The system becomes the work, and individual sites become instances of it.
When those decisions are wrong, the portfolio drifts. Every team solves the same problems independently. Inconsistency compounds. The cost of every future site goes up rather than down.
The two years at Dubai Holding taught me that the most impactful thing a designer can do at this scale is invisible: it's the architectural choices that prevent problems from existing in the first place.