Hareem Bilal
Hareem Bilal works in research and policy on climate, migration and gender, and is based in Munich. She now has a personal website that reads like the front page of a newspaper, bringing her writing, research, CV and social media together in one place. See the site in five views below.
Visit the site live ↗
The site in five views. Click a view to visit it live.
What we did
A site like a newspaper front page
The front page has a masthead in which her name rises letter by letter, a news ticker and her latest piece as the lead story. The Stockholm Environment Institute and the Embassy of Pakistan sit in the ears on either side of the dateline, so it is immediately clear where she works.
Six pages, each with its own opening
Every page opens differently: Writing with her line about trees as infrastructure, Research with a latitude scale plotting the places in her work, the CV with a timeline from 2019 to 2026, Socials with her Instagram bio and About with her portrait at full width.
Her writing and research in one place
Eleven pieces from 2020 to 2026, published in The Express Tribune, The Nation, Pakistan Observer and SIANI, are arranged by year, alongside her peer-reviewed 2026 article with its abstract and DOI. Every headline links to the original.
Her reels on the site
The Socials page shows eleven of her Instagram reels with their view counts, most watched first, alongside excerpts from her LinkedIn posts. The clips load and play, muted, only once they come into view, and the same clips scroll through the footer like a news ticker.
Her own words
The quotes and excerpts on the site are her own words, taken verbatim from her writing, LinkedIn and Instagram, and they link back to the originals. Where the site needs a label, it is kept short and factual.
SEO on every page
A build script generates every page from a single template, giving each one its own title, description, sharing image and structured data that describes her as a person and links to her profiles. The sitemap and robots.txt are generated at the same time.
A check script that catches errors
Before every release, a check script goes through every title, description, heading, link and clip, and stops the release if it finds a broken link or text that breaks the site's writing rules.
Self-hosted fonts
Archivo and Libre Franklin are served from the site itself, so the pages make no requests to Google. The favicon is the masthead in miniature, drawn from the same typeface, and all motion is switched off for visitors who have reduced motion turned on.
Analytics without cookies
Vercel Web Analytics counts visits and clicks through to her reels, profiles, articles and the board she sits on, without cookies or personal data, so we can see which links visitors follow.
Seven profiles, one and the same Hareem Bilal
The site's structured data describes Hareem as a person and points to her seven profiles: LinkedIn, X and Instagram, her pages at The Express Tribune, The Nation and SIANI, and her advisory board role at EHRDF. The links from the site are in place. Once the profiles link back to hareembilal.eu, the connection runs both ways.
hareembilal.euPerson · #hareem
- LinkedInProfile
- X@hareeems
- Instagram@hareeems
- The Express TribuneAuthor page
- The NationColumnist page
- SIANIPerson page
- EHRDFAdvisory board
What happened
Before
No site of her own. Her writing was spread across four publications, the article sat with its publisher and her CV lived on LinkedIn.
The choice
A site that reads like a newspaper, because she writes for newspapers. Three directions were designed at full scale and the newspaper style was chosen. After seeing the first version, she asked for every page to open in its own way and for SEI and the embassy to be visible straight away, and that is what we built.
After
Live since 28 October 2026: six pages and an error page, and her own domain, hareembilal.eu, has been ordered. When we tested the six pages in Lighthouse on 29 October, every one scored 100 for accessibility and best practices on both mobile and desktop, and between 98 and 100 for performance.
Three choices behind the site
The newspaper as the format
Headings are set in a narrow cut of Archivo, like newspaper headlines, with Libre Franklin for the body text. The paper is a warm off-white, never pure white, and the ink is almost black.
One colour, on purpose
Green is the only accent colour, used like printing ink on the paper. The green of the Pakistani flag appears only in the footer, without the crescent and star: it is her site, not the embassy's.
The portrait as a halftone
Her photo is rendered as a newspaper halftone and develops into colour under the cursor. The numbers count up and the clips move, but everything stays still for visitors who have reduced motion turned on.
It was a really smooth and easy process to work with Albin.Hareem B.
Why the site looks the way it does
A researcher and writer needs one place that brings her writing, research and CV together, and that people find when they search for her name. So every page has its own title, description and structured data, and the site is built to load quickly on a phone. On a new domain, indexing decides how quickly Google finds the pages, and you can check whether your own site can be found on Google. We've written more about these topics in Insights.
What a great website does for your company
The difference between a website that just exists and one that brings customers. Why customers google you before they call, and what to demand.
Read more → Local SEOWhy Google indexing decides whether customers find you
If your page is not indexed it does not exist to customers. How indexing works, why more pages give broader exposure, and how you get into Google.
Read more → MaintenanceWhy your website needs looking after
Website maintenance is not optional. A site ages, slows down and can get hacked. What ongoing upkeep means, and why it is cheaper than the alternative.
Read more →Would you like a personal website of your own?
Do you research, write or give talks, and want everything in one place? Get in touch and we'll tell you what we did for Hareem Bilal and what it could mean for you.
Her social media on the site
Her 29 reels since July 2026 have drawn around 3.0 million views between them, and more than 11,000 people follow her on Instagram (figures read on 29 October 2026). The Socials page shows eleven of the clips, most watched first, with views and dates, and each clip links to the original.