Today, The Arc’s web team donned blue beanies. Kevin Wenzel (The Arc’s web producer) and I got a few strange looks, even after he sent out a staff-wide email explaining why web designers and developers everywhere put on blue beanies today.

Colleagues keep asking us and we’ll keep telling them why. We support web standards and the hats signify that we’ll follow that set of best practices for standardized, accessible, universal web design and development.

In the past 18 months, The Arc has made a lot of progress toward doing a better job embracing web standards. We redesigned our main website, rolled out three new blogs and launched two additional sites – keeping web standards in mind from the very beginning. Right now, we’re working hard toward making small tweaks on the back-end of our sites that will make a big difference when it comes to web standards and web accessibility. We’ll share more on that as we move forward.

In the meantime, at least you know why web staffers everywhere are wearing blue beanies, and why Kevin and I look a bit like lumberjacks today.