It’s okay, because Magento is a hack job anyway.
Ah, Magento, the user friendly CMS where trying to figure out if there is an option for that in the back-end might be just as complicated as figuring out how to edit the template and just make the change there yourself.
If you’re ever in the position that you want to display a footer message across your entire Magento site(s), here’s a simple hack that beats “figuring out how modules in Magento work”.
We’re going to add the message in the footer, by editing the template.
FTP to the following folder location, where (template) is the relevant folder for your installation.
/app/design/frontend/(template)/(template)/template/page/html/footer.phtml
Once you’re editing this file, go to the end of the page and add a new div. In that div, you can go to town. Because of Magento’s templating system you can use PHP to do your bidding, or you can use plain old HTML to get your message across.
Happy hacking!