A Bilingual Arabic–English Website for a Saudi Fuel Station Network — With Investor Portal, Renter Portal, Franchise System, and Interactive Map

Darb Stations (درب) is a Saudi Arabian fuel station company operating across the Kingdom with a growing network of stations. What makes Darb distinctive in the Saudi market is their commercial franchise programme — a major strategic initiative launched in partnership with the Ministry of Energy and Monsha’at (the General Authority for Small and Medium Enterprises).

Through this partnership, Darb offers investors the opportunity to own and operate franchise fuel stations under the Darb brand — with guaranteed returns, strategic highway locations, and multiple revenue streams beyond fuel sales (in-station shops, support services, digital loyalty programmes). The website needed to serve two very different audiences simultaneously: investors and entrepreneurs evaluating the franchise opportunity, and renters and tenants looking at station space.

This is not a small business. It’s an enterprise client operating in the Saudi energy sector with government-level institutional backing — and the website had to reflect that credibility.

Building a bilingual website for a Saudi audience isn’t just a translation exercise — it’s a complete layout and direction challenge. Arabic reads right-to-left. English reads left-to-right. That means every page layout, every navigation structure, every button alignment, every text block, and every interactive element needs to work correctly in both directions — not just swap text, but fully mirror the layout.

We used Polylang for the multilingual system and built the entire site in Bricks Builder with proper RTL/LTR handling throughout. The result is two complete website experiences that share the same design system but present correctly for their respective language direction. A Saudi visitor arriving at the Arabic version gets a native Arabic experience — not a translated English site.

Darb’s website isn’t a single-audience brochure. It serves three separate user journeys, each with different information needs and different calls to action. We built each as a distinct section with its own content structure, inquiry forms, and data management — all powered by Advanced Custom Fields inside Bricks Builder.

A fuel station network’s website without a station locator is incomplete. We built the interactive map using the Agile Map Locator plugin, configured with all Darb station locations across Saudi Arabia. The map isn’t just a static list — it’s a functional geographic search tool.

The franchise section is one of the most strategically important parts of the site. Darb’s commercial franchise initiative is backed by a formal cooperation agreement between the Ministry of Energy and Monsha’at — the Saudi government authority for SME development. This gives the franchise programme institutional credibility that needs to be communicated clearly to prospective investors.

Darb operates three distinct station models — different sizes, different investment thresholds, different commercial configurations. The website presents each model with its own visual identity and specification details, so investors can evaluate which model fits their capital and location.

Delivering a bilingual enterprise website with three custom portals, an interactive map, and a full Arabic RTL build in 15 days requires precise execution. The design direction was developed by iTechtics — there was no Figma file to work from. This meant design and development ran in parallel, with approvals happening on a fast cycle.

Polylang was chosen over WPML for this project because of its performance characteristics — for a site where Arabic is the primary language, Polylang’s handling of RTL direction switching is cleaner. ACF inside Bricks Builder gave us the portal content management flexibility without requiring custom plugin development. The Agile Map Locator was the most capable WordPress-native option for the radius search requirement.