Changing "Powered by" links in footer

I have not made a child theme bc I don’t want to start all over again.

Just be aware that if you update the theme because of a bug fix, feature enhancement, security patch, or because a major WordPress upgrade requires a corresponding theme upgrade, then your changes will be lost and you’ll have to “start all over again” anyway. And creating a child theme isn’t that hard, you just need to copy over the files which you’ve already changed over to your child theme folder.

Since you are hard-coding your company name, you don’t need to enclose it in PHP brackets. That is, the PHP brackets are only used to signify that you are running PHP code, and PHP code are usually statements which are used to retrieve some sort of information from a database table, like the site name. So you can simply use:

<div class="copyright">
Copyright Company Name - My Site
</div>
<!-- .copyright -->

Or however else you want to format it.

Thank you, this worked. I’m almost done with the design. If I create a child theme now, will the content, formatting, theme options need to be redone?

Content (pages & posts) will remain intact, just as if you were to switch to a totally different theme. Theme options should also remain intact. Formatting depends on how you did the formatting. If done through the Theme Options (custom CSS or custom jQuery), those should remain intact. The only thing you have to worry about are files which you’ve changed by going to Appearance → Editor, like footer.php. You should copy those files over to your child theme folder and then they will be safe from being overwritten if the theme gets updated/upgraded.

The one exception would be the stylesheet, style.css. You shouldn’t have had to make changes to this file because the theme has an option for adding your own custom CSS, but some people inadvertently do so. If you’ve made changes to style.css, then you just want to copy whatever you’ve changed into your child theme’s style.css file. In a properly created child theme, the parent theme’s style.css file will be used along with your child theme’s style.css file, so there’s no need to copy over the entire contents of the parent theme’s style.css file into the child theme’s.