Dubai Kidz

By ameliaw, March 13, 2008

To help launch my freelancing in Dubai, I approached the founder of the DubaiKidz.biz website (now uae4kidz.biz), Petra Sander and offered to redo her, then very basic HTML, site into a CMS with a template offering a better UX for the thousands of users that were coming to her site, in exchange for referrals to clients. She was very happy to take this offer on.

It was a massive task, as the site was a listing of all activities and services available to parents in Dubai, the very first of its kind. Petra had amassed this information through her years in Dubai and knew how hard it was for parents to find. It became the go-to directory for all family-friendly events, services, and offerings geared to kids.

I used Joomla as my CMS of choice at the time and created a template that would be easy for her to add to for future listings and updates. We worked well together and after the launch of the newly designed site, she saw her traffic increase by 47% and subscribers to her email increased exponentially too. As the business grew, I took on more of a business partner role and started to help sell ads and set up an invoicing system so help keep track of payments.

With the success of DubaiKidz.biz and Petra having relocated to Abu Dhabi, she wanted to launch an AbuDhabiKidz.biz site. We worked with Chelsea from tinybeanevents.com to do a launch for the site at the Abu Dhabi Polo club, giving the local mumpreneurs a chance to come sell their goods and services to families via a market. Again, the first of its kind in the area.

Working on DubaiKidz.biz I learnt a lot, not only on web design and web management but also on networking, marketing and business management. It was a steep learning curve, but most definitely tremendous fun!