Khalifa Alsaadi
An Emirati oil & gas engineer with 50K followers explaining engineering in plain Arabic needed a site that companies and government entities could take seriously — and that he could run himself, without a developer and without learning a CMS.
A creator's site is a media kit that has to keep itself up to date.
Khalifa makes short explainers about cars, petroleum and mechanics — why tyres are black, horsepower versus torque, what a diff lock actually does. His audience lives on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. His next audience — sponsors, exhibitions, ministries — lives in email and wants one link that explains who he is.
The brief was a bilingual site in his own identity: Arabic first, English beside it, his real photos only, and every number, link and sentence editable by him. No WordPress, no plugins, as light as possible.
I wireframed it, designed it, built the backend and the admin, tested it as a user, and wrote him a handover guide in Arabic.
Look like an engineer, read like a creator
Two readers open the same link: a follower who knows his face, and a procurement manager who has never heard of him. The page had to be warm enough for the first and credible enough for the second.
His name is the hero
A cut-out of him in coveralls standing in front of his name, set in Thmanyah Serif Display. Real photos only — AI stand-ins of his face were tried and rejected on the first review, so AI was kept to backgrounds, covers and icons.
Content from his actual feed
Section copy, video cards and blog topics come from his 33 real Instagram thumbnails, not a generic "energy and sustainability" script. Follower counts were verified on the public profiles; unconfirmed platforms show a skeleton instead of a guess.
Arabic is the default, not a translation
RTL first, with the English page mirrored rather than bolted on. Each heading carries one "sticker word" with a 3D icon — the one playful move in an otherwise quiet, glassy system.
An admin he doesn't have to learn
He didn't want a dashboard of forms. He wanted to open his own site, click the sentence that's wrong, and fix it — and to be able to ask ChatGPT to publish a post for him.
Edit where you read
Logged in, every text on the public page becomes editable and every image gets a replace button that opens the media library. Every save is written to a history table, so any change can be reverted in one click.
Saving went from 100 s to 2 s
The first version posted all 73 content keys on every save and wrote them one after another to the database — long enough to hit a proxy timeout. Now the page diffs against a snapshot and the server writes only what changed, in parallel.
Run the site from a chat
An MCP server and a REST API with an OpenAPI spec expose 20 tools — create and publish posts, upload images, change any text, hide a section, read the inbox — behind a bearer token, through the same service layer as the admin.
The site is built for search engines and for AI answers: server-rendered text, Person, FAQ and Article structured data, an editable llms.txt, and a sitemap and feed that rebuild themselves. Lighthouse mobile scores 92 performance, 96 accessibility, 100 best practices and 100 SEO.
Next is launch on his own domain, then the numbers that matter for a creator site: collaboration requests per month, where they came from, and which articles bring in people who didn't already follow him.