Case study
Erin Hoover
An author site for the inaugural Poet Laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee — three collections, a reading series and a press kit in one place she owns.
Client
Erin Hoover is a poet, an associate professor of English at Tennessee Tech University, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee. She has published three collections: Barnburner, No Spare People, and Consent, forthcoming in 2027.
Situation
Her third collection publishes in 2027, and she and her publisher agreed she had outgrown the site she had — a template that could not hold three books, a poet laureateship and a decade of press.
The rest of her work lived on a publisher’s page, a university bio and a few social accounts. None of those were hers, and none of them were in one place.
Problem
There was a gap between how the site looked and the career it represented.
The practical cost is specific to her trade: a festival programmer or an event booker deciding whether to invite a poet needs the books, the credentials and a way to make contact in one place, and they will not assemble it from four.
Approach
Start from the ask. Everything on the site funnels toward an invitation to read, so the structure was built backwards from that rather than from a conventional author-site template.
That structure came out of interviews rather than out of a layout: books, poems, press and appearances, each given its own room, decided before a single page was designed.
The credentials do the persuading, so they had to be legible immediately — laureateship, awards, publishers and anthologies stated as text near the top rather than buried in a biography.
Build
A site she owns outright, covering the three collections including the forthcoming one, the poems, the reading series she runs, and a press kit a programmer can work from.
Every path ends at one destination: the invitation form, which takes bookings for readings, craft talks, workshops and classroom visits.
The build follows the same standard as the rest of our website work: static pages, semantic structure, information as text rather than as images, and structured data that matches what is visible. Search, answer-engine and generative-engine optimization were part of that build rather than a later pass over it.
Static site build, custom design, original copy, original portrait photography, and AI-generated image assets. No page builder and no subscription — the code, content, domain and hosting account are hers.
Result
No measured results yet. The site launched recently, and we publish numbers only when there is something countable to publish. What can be said today: the site exists, she owns it, and a programmer can find the books, the credentials and the invitation form in one place.
Client feedback
“I'm so glad I found Red Robot AI, who created a sleek and highly intuitive author website for me in about a week. The designer, Josh, went back and forth with me to ensure my site was saying what I intended and delivering everything someone looking for my books would want to know. My new site works with algorithms and gets my work in front of readers, and it looks so much better than the clunky plug-and-play design that I had before. The people behind Red Robot AI have taste, aesthetics, and judgment; at the same time, they work quickly and are dedicated to getting things right.”
— Erin Hoover, in a Google review. Quoted verbatim.
Current status
The site is live, and her third collection publishes in 2027. This page will carry numbers when there are numbers worth carrying.
Lesson
A practitioner hired on reputation needs the evidence of that reputation in one place she controls — and the structure of the site should follow the decision a visitor is there to make, not a template.
Questions
- What did Red Robot AI do on this project?
- Design, build, SEO, GEO, AEO, copy, portrait photography and AI image assets.
- How long did it take?
- About a week, in her own words. That is her account of the build rather than a service-level promise — every project is scoped from what it actually needs.
- Are there results to report?
- No numbers yet — the site launched recently and there is no countable outcome to publish. The client feedback above is a verified Google review.
Talk about a site like this
Website builds are quoted within a published band. The pricing page has it in full.
Red Robot AI — Franklin, TN. Serving Middle Tennessee and beyond.