How to reference an EPiServer page?

When I started out developing on EPiServer, I was frustrated by the bewildering number of ways to reference and access pages, and at times none of these seemed quite right for the task at hand.
I was using an EPiServer PageList control to display a navigation aid to child pages of the current page, but I needed one of the child pages to trigger some special formatting. I ended up checking the PageID to detect when to trigger the special formatting, but I was never particularly happy with that solution. I stored the PageID of the "special page" in the web.config file, but it still left me feeling like I'd missed a better way to do this.

This blog post by Emil Åström has excellent coverage of this topic, presenting the pro's and con's of each approach quite nicely. The last two methods are my favourites, and I will be using those techniques from now on.

Ted Nyberg has also put up an simple example of how to access an EPiServer page's friendly URL.