| Client | Farouq Abdulaziz |
|---|---|
| Industry | Film criticism & cultural archive |
| Services | Web design, content digitization, bilingual SEO |
| Languages | Arabic & English |
The starting situation
Farouq Abdulaziz is an Egyptian writer, director, producer and TV presenter whose film criticism was published across Arab-world magazines from 1968 to 2005, alongside his long-running show Cine Club and decades of interviews on television — including Al Jazeera and Kuwait TV. Nearly four decades of that work existed only as physical magazine pages and broadcast recordings — real, significant material with no digital presence for readers or researchers to actually find.
The problem
This wasn't a typical "get more customers" brief. The material's value is historical and cultural — it needed to survive and be searchable, not just look presentable. That meant the build had to solve a genuinely different problem than a business site: how do you take decades of print articles, most of which exist nowhere else online, and make them both readable and discoverable without losing the connection to their original source?
What I built
Each article goes through OCR extraction from the original magazine scan, and the site stores four things per piece: the publication date, the magazine it appeared in, the OCR-extracted text, and the scanned image of the original page itself. That last part matters — a reader (or a researcher citing the piece) can always verify the extracted text against the actual printed article, rather than trusting a transcription on faith.
Alongside the article archive, the site has a dedicated section for Cine Club, the show Farouq is best known for, and embeds his interviews from YouTube and television appearances — including Al Jazeera and Kuwait TV — so the video record sits next to the written one instead of being scattered across separate platforms.
The whole site is bilingual, in Arabic and English, which matters twice over here: the majority of the source material is in Arabic, and a proper bilingual build — not a translation plugin layered on top — is exactly the kind of work covered in bilingual Arabic/English SEO in Kuwait.
SEO and discoverability work
An archive is only useful if the specific article someone's looking for is actually findable — through Google, not just by browsing. That means clean per-article URLs, structured data identifying each piece as a distinct article with its real publication date, and page structure that treats OCR'd historical text with the same technical care as any other content, rather than as an afterthought bolted onto scanned images.
Traffic and search figures for this project aren't published yet — this case study will be updated if Farouq shares them.
Related reading
Have material that deserves a real digital home?
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