Contracting websites: beyond the PDF profile

Type بروفايل شركة مقاولات into Google and it completes into pdf, ppt, ready-to-edit and free. Type تصميم موقع شركة مقاولات and it barely completes at all. Contracting firms in the Kingdom are looking for a profile document, not a website — which tells you how the sector still presents itself, and where the room is.

A profile only reaches whoever already asked

A company profile is sent — by email, by WhatsApp, in a tender envelope. It works only after someone has already made contact, and it tells you nothing about the people who considered you and moved on. A website works in the other direction: it is what someone finds before deciding whether to call, and it is the only version of your company that is available at eleven at night when a consultant is drawing up a shortlist.

What someone checks before they call

• Have you built anything like mine — same type, same scale, same city?
• What do you actually self-perform, and what do you subcontract?
• Classification, licences and certifications, stated plainly rather than as a wall of logos.
• Who is accountable, and how do I reach them today?

Project pages are the argument

A services list claims capability; a project page demonstrates it. Scope, location, discipline, duration and contract type on a page of its own will do more for a contractor than any amount of adjectives, and each one is a page that can be found on its own terms.

We built exactly this in Rasikh Contracting, a concept build of ours rather than commissioned work: fourteen pages, nine of them individual project case studies, each carrying its own scope and location. It is in the work section of this site, and it is the shape we would argue for with a real contractor.

Arabic is not the second version

The people who award contracting work in Saudi Arabia read Arabic. A site where Arabic is a translation poured into an English layout reads as an afterthought to exactly the audience that matters — and it shows in small, visible ways: numbers that break the line, headings that wrap badly, forms whose labels sit on the wrong side. Designing both directions at once costs less than repairing one later.

What convinces nobody

• A stock photograph of a crane against a sunset, on the same theme as three competitors.
• A capability list with no project behind any item on it.
• Numbers with no year attached — "over 500 projects" that could mean since 1998 or since last spring.
• A contact page that is only a form, on a site whose visitors expect to phone someone.

Start from the profile you already have

If your profile is current, most of the website already exists. The project list becomes project pages, the capability section becomes service pages, the classification and certifications become a page a consultant can check, and the company history becomes the about page. What has to be added is usually photography of work you have actually delivered — and that is worth commissioning properly, because it is the one thing competitors cannot copy from a theme.

If you have a profile and no site, send it to us. We will tell you what it already covers, what is missing, and what it would take to turn it into something a client can find.