Web Development

I was experiencing a few problems with one of my sites and ran a few html files through a W3C check. These are admittedly somewhat old code files but with over 9300 html or php files they can, realistically, only be changed via bulk seach & replace. One thing W3C told me I needed to do was change the html statement to <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">. I have done this for the complete site and re-uploaded it (almost 2 days!) but almost all the non-alphanumerical characters show as a null sybol. This includes lots of common ones such as ° (as in °C), £ ¢ € etc. It does show up the % symbol. Basic fonts are set up via the CSS: font: 12px arial, verdana, geneva, helvetica, sans-serif; As these are all standard (reasonably) full character set fonts there seems no reason why this is happening. Any ideas?