yasnipped has been installed on emacs using elpa/melpa package system.
I can confirm it's in ~/.emacs.d/elpa/yasnippet-20160104.129
When I load an .html file there's no yasnippet menu, as expected, please advise. I did not add anything extra to .emacs
I think your solution might cause you some problems when it comes to updating the elpa yasnippet package. Normally not a good idea to rename the package directories.
There are a couple of things you probably should try first.
When you have opened an html file, try running
M-x yas-minor-mode
If this works, then all you need to do is add a call to yas-minor-mode in the startup hook for html-mode.
Alternatively, you can try executing
M-x yas-global-mode
If this works, then all you need to do is put a call to
(yas-global-mode)
in your init.el file
If this does not work, check the value of the variables yas-snippets-dirs and yas-installed-snippets-dirs. The former is the normal yas variable which lists the directories to search for snippets. The latter is a variable which should contain the path to the top level snippets directory in the elpa package. The former would normally contain something like
"~/.emacs.d/snippets" yas-installed-snippets-dires
If the yas-installed-snippets-dirs variable exists and looks correct, you could try putting something like
(yas/load-directory yas-installed-snippets-dirs)
in your init.el file after you have done the require for yasnippets