About Mythical Creatures List

The Mythical Creature List website was created by myself from coding to writing. Seeing the lack of websites and information surrounding mythical creatures, I wanted to create a website that not only described mythical beings but brought them to life.

This is me at my desk!

  A Very Brief History

I first launched the website in January 2011 under the name MythBeasts. However there was a lot to change and do. After much work the website was relaunched on October 10th as Mythical Creatures List. Later in December, the gallery and illustrations were added and the shop opened in early 2012.

  The Research

The main bread and butter of the website. The goal was to write 3,000 articles - now thats a lot of work. A huge amount of my time has been taken reading and writing these descriptions. There is no plagiarism here. Everything you read has been rewritten by myself. Once I had sucked out information from all my books at home I visited the British Library many times to discover the lost and forgotten mythical creatures including the Chinese animals of the mountains and the various Taniwha of Maori legend.

  The Design

Well not much of a designer here so I didn't risk going for gradients and textures. Instead I wanted to create an artistic look. There are 2 main background designs: the burnt parchment and the torn tapestry. The burnt parchment is for the articles and pages that mainly have text, like this one. The idea is to make you feel you have picked up an old scroll or page of a book about curious sightings. The tapestry is for the images as tapestries are known to be historical images that sometimes would contain mythical creatures.

  The Coding

I taught myself coding languages including HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript. This website was created in a simple text-editor. There is no content management system (unless you count phpmyadmin as one), all changes are made directly into the coding. The questionnaire What Mythical Creature Are You? was coded myself and relies on a simple form and mathematical equation that is repeated 50 times for 50 results.

  The Social Media

The world of mythical creatures is not restricted to this website. I regularly tweet and post news about mythical beings from around the world. I also post the featured mythical creature of the day. I also tweet and post news about myself making updates about the website like a constant behind the scenes and there are always updates happening - this site's got no cobwebs.

I would like to thank all the authors of whom I used their research and information, all the artists who let me use their images and finally to all you visitors providing me with deep insightful information, feedback and simply for visiting and enjoying this mythical creature website.

Enjoy this site,

kind regards, Richard