Imdaad: A Bilingual Corporate Website on React and Contentful

Overview

Imdaad is one of the largest integrated facilities management companies in the Middle East, based in Dubai with operations in the UAE, Oman and Egypt. Its corporate website presents the group, a large set of services and sub-brands, its people, and its technology work, in both English and Arabic.

I joined the project through a Dubai-based digital agency, as a freelancer hired on Upwork, when the site was about halfway built. Over 6–8 months I took it through to completion: building whole sections of the site, managing content and data in Contentful, finishing the Arabic version, and solving a performance problem in production. The client's review on this project helped me earn Upwork's Top Rated badge.

The challenge

A large group website is mostly about content: dozens of pages, sub-pages and sub-brands that the client's own team must be able to update without a developer. The site had to:

• Cover a deep structure: group, services with sub-services, people, technology and innovation, and more
• Work fully in English and Arabic, including right-to-left layout, on every screen size
• Let the marketing team publish and edit content in Contentful without breaking pages
• Load fast with large images and heavy pages
• Stay up when traffic spikes, for example around news or campaigns

My role

• Group section: built the group pages, including the People area and its sub-pages: Board of Directors, Leadership, Life at Imdaad, and Learning & Development
• Services section: built service pages and their sub-service pages
• Technology and Innovation: built the section and its sub-pages, such as the AI Centre of Excellence and Smart Innovation
• Arabic and RTL: handled both languages in Contentful and made every page fully responsive in left-to-right and right-to-left
• Contentful: content modelling, publishing entries, managing relationships between content types, and image compression
• UI fixes: a large number of layout and responsiveness fixes across the existing site
• Performance: fixed server latency and added a caching layer over pages after a traffic spike

The approach

Building on a headless CMS

The frontend is React with TypeScript, and all content lives in Contentful. For each section, I worked out how the content should be structured: which content types exist, which fields they need, and how they link to each other (a service links to its sub-services, a person to their team, and so on). This keeps pages consistent and lets the client's team add or edit content safely.

People and leadership pages

The People area brings together the Board of Directors, the leadership teams, life at Imdaad, and learning and development. The leadership page is grouped into executive, business unit and support services leadership, each with profiles pulled from Contentful.

Services and sub-services

Imdaad offers many services under several brands, from Hard FM and fire safety to lifts, soft services and environmental services. I built service pages and their sub-pages from shared templates, so every service follows the same structure while its content comes from the CMS.

imdaad.ae

Technology and Innovation

I built the Technology and Innovation section and its sub-pages, which present Imdaad's AI Centre of Excellence and its smart building work.

English and Arabic, on every screen

Every page works in English and Arabic. Content for both languages is managed in Contentful, and the layout switches fully to right-to-left for Arabic: text alignment, spacing, icons and navigation all mirror correctly, and all of it stays responsive from mobile to desktop.

imdaad.ae/ar

Fixing a traffic spike with caching

At one point the server hit a traffic spike and pages slowed down. I traced the latency to pages being rebuilt from Contentful on every request, and added a caching layer over the pages, so most visitors get a fast cached page and the CMS and server aren't overloaded. I also compressed images to cut page weight.

Architecture

• Editors → Contentful CMS: Publish EN + AR
• Contentful CMS → Server / rendering: Content API
• Server / rendering → Page cache
• Page cache → Visitors
• Contentful CMS → Compressed images: Images
• Compressed images → Visitors

Technical highlights

• Headless CMS done properly: structured content types and relationships in Contentful, so the client's team can manage a large site on their own
• Full bilingual support: English and Arabic with complete right-to-left layouts, responsive on every device
• Production performance fix: a caching layer that kept the site fast through traffic spikes
• Joining mid-project: picked up an existing codebase halfway through and took it to launch