The wintry weather may have led to “traffic chaos” across the UK this week – but not as far as regional newspaper websites are concerned.

In fact some of them have been reporting a surge in traffic over recent days as people turn to them for updates on public transport services and school closures.

Although some journalists have found it a struggle getting into work, the regional press has by and large been treating the cold snap as an opportunity rather than a threat.

As well as providing much-needed public service information, local newspapers have been using their sites to display hundreds of snow pictures sent in by readers.

At BPM Media, the Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post and Sunday Mercury sites combined to produce a Live Snow Zone blog for their readers.

Multimedia editor Steve Woolaston used the liveblogging platform CoverIt Live to post up-to-the-minute information about school closures and answer readers’ queries about local services.

Said Steve: “It has proven to be massively successful with hundreds of comments and some very satisfied users. We updated school closures every couple of minutes and had web-users helping to update others too.”

The live blog can be seen here.

Elsewhere, Maidenhead Advertiser digital editor Kelly Rawlings logged in from her laptop at home after being unable to make it in to the office and was remotely updating the newspaper’s website with traffic and schools closure news.

Her efforts paid dividends as the paper’s website logged its largest ever number of page impressions – around 17,000 from around 3,500 unique users.

And page impressions for the Southern Daily Echo’s site rose to around 450,000 on Monday when the majority of the stories were snow related.

In addition to news, advice and photo galleries, the website carried a host of videos such as readers’ snowball fights and a guide on how to build a snowman family.