Hi Ian - welcome to Our Umbraco!

I tend to put "global" settings and content like navs and footers in a site settings node.

From Razor (in views) you can "get" this node - either by going to the root node and looking for the first "SiteSettings" node or, my preference, to get it by node Id. During dev you'll create the site settings node before peeling off Uat and live versions so that ID is never going to change - there is a risk content editors will delete it I suppose but by the same argument they can delete the homepage too!

Then you can "get" the Site settings node on your master template or where ever you need it.

    var siteSettingsNode = Umbraco.TypedContent(1234));
    // or you could get the siteSettingsNode by having a value set on a picker on the root home node?
 //       var siteSettingsNode = Umbraco.TypedContent(rootNode.GetPropertyValue("siteSettingsNode"));

Then you just have to use the siteSettings Node like you would Model.Content

// Example below is using the RJP Multi Url Picker for footer links. 
     @if (siteSettingsNode.HasValue("FooterCol1Links"))
                    {
                        var col1Links = siteSettingsNode.GetPropertyValue<MultiUrls>("FooterCol1Links");
                        if (col1Links.Any())
                        {
                            <ul>
                                @foreach (var footerLink in col1Links)
                                {
                                    <li><a href="@footerLink.Url" target="@footerLink.Target">@footerLink.Name</a></li>
                                }
                            </ul>
                        }                   
                    }

In certain circumstances (MVC etc) you'll have to use an Umbraco Helper

HTH

Steve

That's great Steve, thanks very much.

I've now got the following code working as planned:

    public static string    GetURL(string alias)
    {
        UmbracoHelper helper = new UmbracoHelper(UmbracoContext.Current);

        return helper.TypedContentAtRoot().DescendantsOrSelf(alias).FirstOrDefault().Url;
    }

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