I did converted my website for UTF-8 before i found your thread but i did basicaly most of the things described.
So we can accept that "yes it did work for me", actually, i converted my files from Windows-1251 to UTF-8 as an aditional work, because if you use old encoding, you end up with a mess, or as i like to say MESS.

Actually it is very nice article, even short - full of information.