Character Encoding

Recently took over a project from another designer and I don’t know much about the set up. All I know is when I post text into the html file it renders terrible.
I set a meta like so:
<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=utf-8” />

and when I go to validate it says:

  The character encoding specified in the HTTP header         (iso-8859-1)       is different from the value in the &lt;meta&gt; element       (utf-8).

How do I check the HTTP header? I have come across special character issues in the past and dropped the meta content type and it fixed it. Is this a server setting or something?