Taco Bell trims its name to short URL ta.co on website

By MixDex Article may include affiliate links

Mexican fast food chain Taco Bell is using a variation of its traditional logo design on its website that includes a short URL.

  • The design includes the bell icon with “TA.CO” below it.
  • In addition to reading as “taco” — the dot in it makes the logo a “short URL.”
  • Instead of the traditional .com ending used on many websites (including tacobell.com), “TA.CO” takes advantage of a so called “domain hack.”
  • By using .co, the country code extension for Colombia, combined with the first two letters of its name, the “TA.CO” logo creates a readable logo (if one ignores the dot) and working website address all in one.
  • Entering www.ta.co into a browse takes you Taco Bell’s website, although the company redirects the URL to its full tacobell.com domain.
  • While .com domain names still dominate, the .co domain extension gained popularity thanks to its similarity to the word “company” and the widely used abbreviation for the word.
  • The .co extension, like .de and .es (for Germany and Spain, respectively) is also used in domain hacks much like what Taco Bell is doing — to form words that end in “co,” “es” and “de.”
  • Newer domain generic extensions such as .movie and .restaurant are becoming more common and therefore more widely recognized.
  • In addition to being used by companies who find their name’s .com equivalent taken, both country code and the new generic top level domain extensions are also widely used in vanity URL shorteners.
  • Vanity URL shorteners function much like the tinyurl.com and bit.ly services, but contain a variation of the company’s name, main product line or other term to make links posted to social media more recognizable.