You and/or your developer used a brain-dead editor (probably from Microsoft) that "helpfully" inserts the UTF-8 BOM on files edited under UTF-8 (even if the file contains only ASCII characters). The BOM is absolutely unnecessary and can be safely removed. Do you think some of your page content is stored in the database? If a BOM is stored in there, it could be difficult to edit it out, especially if you can't even see it! Do you need to have UTF-8, rather than Latin-1 encoding? Who is your audience, and what languages will they be using? Anyway, if you do want to keep UTF-8 pages and database, you need to figure out how to display and edit files and database entries in Latin-1 or CP-1252. That is necessary to see the BOM and get rid of it. I seem to recall that there might be a tool floating around on the SMF forum (simplemachines.org's file_check.php) that checks and repairs files, and among other things, gets rid of BOMs (I think). You also need to find whose editor is adding the BOM in the first place (if it comes back after removing it), and either switch to another editor (Notepad++ has a switch to save a file without BOM), or learn how to configure that one not to add BOMs. Maybe you can download your files (such as about.php) to a different PC that uses CP-1252 or the like, see and edit out the BOMs there, and upload back to the server. As for BOMs in the database, maybe you can bring up the CMS editor or phpMyAdmin, manually switch the display character encoding in the browser (View > Character Encoding) to Western Latin-1 or Windows-1252 or whatever, see and remove the BOM, switch back to UTF-8, and save it. You'll have to do some experimenting, as I'm not at your PC, but something along those lines should eventually work.