Welcome to October 7th, 2008! Below are a few press release that caught our attention this morning that you might find interesting. We'll be covering some of these releases throughout the day. If you have a news announcement you would like to share with the Website Magazine community, please contact Website Magazine editors now.

Over 80 Percent of Business Websites 'Throwing Away Sales', Survey Reveals
A survey carried out by Backbone IT Group and Lancaster University concludes that the majority of websites are wasting visitor traffic, resulting in a significant amount of lost business and substantially fewer sales enquiries.

BlogCatalog Launches First Comprehensive Search Engine of its Kind Developed by a Blogger Community
BlogCatalog.com, a premier social network for bloggers, launched a total aggregation search engine that delivers search results from the BlogCatalog directory, member blog posts, discussion areas, blog tags, post tags, and more than 20 social networks.

Sitemasher Launches Free Website Design Contest
Sitemasher's newly released online website platform unleashes the design process from the complexities of coding. To encourage both students and professionals to experience this design freedom, Sitemasher today launched a free website design contest that rewards the best in design, usability, functionality and ease of maintenance.

Google Trends Used to Promote Fake Anti-Virus Software
Internet criminals are using Search Engine Optimization tactics to promote links to free hosted blog sites in an attempt to dupe unsuspecting visitors into infecting themselves with malware and fake anti-virus products, say experts from Marshal's TRACE threat team.

EnCirca Announces Surge in .Pro Domain Registrations
Today, EnCirca announces there has been a 100 percent surge in .pro domain registrations since RegistryPro relaunched the domain one month ago. This enormous surge in registrations demonstrates there is an unmet market demand for professional service firms who wish to develop their online brand.