The changes I've outlined above, just instruct how the browser is display the page. It doesnt change anything stored in your database.
As an example to present things in their most simplest form:Think of the UTF-8 character set as a language, trying to verbally read another language called, ISO-8859-1. And lets say that this ISO-8859-1 language includes many accents. Every time UTF-8 comes across a accent character that it doesnt understand, it uses a "black diamond" to represent that character. Ultimately, just because it is being displayed as UTF-8 in this case, it doesnt change the ISO-8859-1 language being stored in your database.
Its like if you were to read a menu written in French and you couldnt pronounce the accents correctly, you would just use the "English" pronunciation skills (which you probably learned in grade school) that you already know, to pronounce those words. This would not change what is written on that French menu, but it would not sound like French when you are verbally pronouncing it.
Ideally, the best thing is to create your DB in UTF-8 from day one. This happens for new sites, but for sites that already have a solid foundation, such as yours, converting to UTF-8 and moving forward is ultimately the best solution. There is currently no script written to do this, but there is
an extremely rough how-to guide on it.
Have a quick read through and look at the graphic on this page:
http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/02/unicode-over-60-percent-of-web.html
