but when I “publish” and check the footer, there is no link, no title, and when I go back into customize/layout/footer, here is what I see in place of the above entered text:
If you look at the page itself, you will see that yes, the “a href” is typed in. I tried to copy and paste the exact code that I entered into my question, but it was translated into straight up text.
I formatted the “Web by” link, as far as I know, correctly.
Please do check the underlying html of the footer in the URL I included with my original post.
but every time I type that into the footer box in customize/layout/footer, alongside the copyright notice and mailto link, the link information is stripped out.
No idea why, except maybe the smart quotes on the title tag, but I copied and pasted the code I wanted into BBEdit, made the smartquotes plain quotes, and reentered the code, and now it works!