Green Velvet is a ladies salon in Abu Dhabi whose clientele reads Arabic and English in roughly equal measure. A bolted-on translation plugin would have made one of those audiences a second-class visitor.

So the site was designed twice and built once: one information architecture, two fully-native reading directions.

RTL is not a mirror. Numerals stay left-to-right, mixed strings break, and layouts that look considered in English collapse into ambiguity in Arabic if the typography was never tested.

Beyond language, a salon lives or dies on local discovery — the site had to be inseparable from its Google Business Profile.

Treat the booking as the product. Every route on the site is at most two taps from a WhatsApp booking with the service pre-filled.

Then build an editorial layer around the searches people actually make — a guides hub covering Moroccan bath, best ladies salon in Abu Dhabi and similar intent — so the site earns attention before the booking, not only during it.

Deep green and warm neutrals, generous whitespace, photography treated as texture rather than as a gallery. Quiet luxury rather than salon-cliché gold.

Arabic typography was set independently — line height, weight and tracking tuned for the script rather than inherited from the Latin scale.

A custom WordPress theme with a proper bilingual routing layer, a careers page, a vision page and a guides hub, all sharing one component system.

Local business schema, service schema and a Google Business Profile set up alongside the build so the two reinforce each other from launch day.

A salon site that reads as premium in both languages, and my first project delivered as an independent studio rather than as a freelancer taking orders.