The paper says it wanted to produce a version of its website that would be device neutral, and will continue to develop the tablet site for new devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, when their market share reaches a significant level in Germany.
The iPad-friendly site, produced with touchscreen technology in mind, has been launched in an addition to Zeit Online's existing apps for the device and its iPhone counterpart. The title's iPad app is paid for and includes the options to read a digital edition of the weekly printed paper and download content for offline browsing, which will not be included through the iPad version of the website.
"We didn't connect the iPad with the 'classic web' as you call it, the iPad has always been connected with the open internet and comes preconfigured with the safari browser. The enormous opportunities of the iPad as a browsing or surfing device have been overlooked during the first months of - understandable - app euphoria.
"We simply think that there are several distinct user types for the iPad: there are users who strongly prefer apps and other users who primarily use the iPad as a surfing device and want apps only for tasks that can't be done with the browser. We want to make attractive offers to both user types," says editor in chief of Zeit Online Wolfgang Blau in a recent interview for Werben & Verkaufen magazine.
Blau says the iPad optimised site will be used to direct a larger audience of iPad users towards the paid-for apps and content and that more paid-for applications based around Zeit content are planned.
The team behind the new site had to think "how a website is built that is used with a finger", according to the video shown below. The site has been developed with particular attention to multimedia, for example creating photo slideshows and videos that can be video with or without Flash software.
"The first sketches of our editorial developer team led by Fabian Mohr made it even more obvious that tablet-optimized sites not only need much larger touch spaces around text links, but that the overall design asks for a strict reduction down to a site’s very essence for users to quickly find their way around," says a statement on the site's editors' blog.
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