Audience is up and the operation is unchanged
Gulf publishers grew the audience and kept the newsroom the same size. The gap is filled by unplanned work: a rebuild that never lands, a CMS nobody trusts, and a page speed that costs more traffic every quarter.
The unplanned work is the work
Somebody is always fixing something. A template broke, an ad script slowed the article page, the archive is not indexed, a migration is half done. None of it is on a roadmap and all of it is on somebody's evening.
Five signs this page is for you
Tick the ones you recognise. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no score: the count is for you, not for us.
Read them again. If none of them land, this page is not for you, and the services page is the shorter route.
Our services, written for your work
The same ones we sell to everybody. What changes is which part of your job each one takes off your desk.
Web development
Article and section templates held to a performance budget, with the third party scripts audited and the ones nobody can justify removed.
Read the serviceSEO management
Archive and topic architecture so that ten years of reporting is findable, and the page that should rank for a story is the one that does.
Read the serviceAI transformation
Being the source an assistant cites rather than summarises away: structured data, crawler access, and answers written to be quoted correctly.
Read the serviceGrowth transformation
Fractional leadership for the quarter where the newsroom needs a technical decision made and there is nobody to make it.
Read the serviceThe terms that matter before the price does
Count the unplanned work first
We measure what share of engineering time is reactive. It is the number that tells you whether the problem is capacity or architecture.
Stabilise before rebuilding
A migration that has run for two quarters is stopped and scoped again, not accelerated.
The archive is an asset
Old reporting is treated as inventory to be made findable, not as history.
Handed to the newsroom
Editors publish without an engineer. That is the test.
What it looked like on a real engagement
Three engineers, no leadership, always firefighting
A capable small team shipping constantly in the wrong direction, with founder attention as the only architecture.
- Unplanned work
- 28%6%
- Engineers
- 37
- Incidents
- 91.4
Month six against month zero. Source: Linear and Sentry, November 2024
When we are the wrong call
- The ad stack cannot be touched under any circumstances
- Editorial and engineering will not agree on a single owner
- Success is defined as pageviews
Asked on the first call
Do you touch editorial?
No. We work on the systems that carry it and on whether it is found. What is published, and by whom, is the newsroom's.
Can you finish our migration?
Usually. The first thing we do is stop it and scope it again, because a migration that has run this long is rarely blocked on effort.
What about AI scraping our work?
Two different questions. Whether to allow the crawler is yours and belongs in robots.txt. Whether you are cited when it does is engineering, and that is what we work on.
Arabic and English?
Both, and correctly. This site is built the same way, and the Arabic is written rather than translated.
One email a month, on what actually shipped
What we built that month, what it cost, and what we would do differently. No campaign, no offer, and one click to leave.
Bring the brief you are not sure you can deliver
Forty five minutes with the engineer who would run it. We will tell you on that call if the date is not reachable.