Introduced by club member John Kirkwood, Clyde Valley Flyers is new to the modelflight club scene.

Like the two other sites featured on this page this month, the site implies it has recently undergone a face lift, although there is an item on the site dating back to February 2007, but that may have been carried over from the previous design.

Clyde Valley Flyers are based in Renfrewshire, Scotland, with many of its members living in Paisley and surrounding areas. A wide variety of r/c aircraft are flown from the club field located near Kilmacolm, including gliders, jets and helicopters as well as control line planes and, apparently, even a big kite! Membership includes young and old, male and female, with skill levels from the 'extremely talented' right down 'to the likes of me' says the site's anonymous webmaster! Training is offered with the club instructor and even includes initial use of the club trainer for newbies to get a feel for the hobby before spending out on their own equipment.

The website is neatly laid out with a straightforward navigation menu that appears in full on every page so, like modelflight, it is easy to navigate from any page to any page on the site without getting lost in a maze of sub-menus!

As evidenced by the screenshot of the navigation menu on the right, there is a wide variety of useful club-related information on the site, as well as a couple of interesting galleries, one dedicated to crashed models which is tear-jerkingly accompanied by the Dead March from Handel's 'Saul'!

http://www.clydevalleyflyers.com/index2.php

Two new websites launched

Spanking new site for Lismore MFC

Garry Henderson-Smith wrote to tell me that his club in Australia, Lismore Model Flying Club, now has a new web address. Not only that, the site has been completely re-designed with a very smart, modern look about it.

Clean and uncluttered, the new site does not use the conventional type of menu - some of which can be very confusing and leave you a bit uncertain as to where you are. Instead, there is a neat list of 'Site Resources' on the opening page. The list consists of a brief synopsis of each main feature on the site alongside a large 'bullet' with the description followed by an unambiguous 'Read more' link to take you to the feature.

Current features include The Great Photo Search Competition - open to all, as they are searching for the world's ten best model aircraft photographs; Information for visiting pilots; Survival notes for beginners; Our newsletter - thought to be one of the best in Australia (and actually edited by modelflight reader Garry Henderson-Smith); Mini-tutorials; Seen at the field recently - an image gallery portraying members and their aircraft; Weather channel - a live link to a 24-hour weather reporting station hardly a stone's throw from the club airfield; Pages covering competition details and events and a somewhat unusual Raffle page.

That's a lot of content for a club website, and they hope that it will be constantly changing to make it interesting and perhaps amusing enough to keep people looking in occasionally. It's certainly worth a visit from a casual browser's point of view; hopefully club members will also make regular use of a great resource.

Take a look - you will find it at:

http://lismoremodelflyingclub.org.au/

Willy Howe MFC website gets the treatment too

Formerly Bridlington and District Aeronautical Club and renamed almost two years ago, Willy Howe Model Flying Club have launched a brand new website.

The design of the new site is clean and modern, with a general theme of white text on a deep grey background, which looks very smart. Unfortunately, headings and links are shown in black which makes them extremely difficult to see on the deep grey background, although if you pass your mouse over one of the nearly invisible links it does change to a light green.

Main pages on the site are linked from neat tabs that appear along the top of each page and cover the usual club site features of events, location, joining information, weather, links, gallery and video material - some are still 'under construction'. The weather page (right) is rather special, as it carries live information from Eddsfield, a full size airfield some four miles from Willy Howe's own flying site. The data is presented in graphic form, using moving dials and 'thermometer' type scales - again, though, the colours used for the background text and thermometer gradations make it difficult to read them comfortably.

http://www.whmfc.co.uk/

Hawkes Bay Radio Flyers' big event

Here's the top part of the official poster for Hawkes Bay Radio Flyers (North Island, New Zealand) big event in February.

Click the image to see the complete poster with details of the event, including contact details for booking your accommodation.

Find out more about Hawkes Bay RF on their website at

http://hbrf.org.nz/phpnuke/index.php