Hi All,

I would like to implement a my own custom page not found to present a friendlier error message to the user when they request a page url that does not exist.

I have done some research and many suggest updating the page ID reference in the <error404>1</error404> tag in the umbracoSetttings.config. Is there a better approach to do this or is this the only way to do it in umbraco?

In other asp.net mvc applications i have seen it where you can create a controller e.g. pageNotFound controller and in there you just put the follwoing code that simply returns a view

// GET: PageNotFound
        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            //return 404 view when site page not found
            return View();
        }

In your view (My view is a page that i created in umbaco) you add all your styles to make it look presentable and the final step is to add something like the following in the web.config

<httpErrors existingResponse="Replace" defaultResponseMode="ExecuteURL" errorMode="Custom">
   <remove statusCode="404" subStatusCode="-1" />
   <error statusCode="404" prefixLanguageFilePath="" path="/PageNotFound" responseMode="ExecuteURL" />
   <remove statusCode="403" subStatusCode="-1" />
   <error statusCode="403" prefixLanguageFilePath="" path="/PageNotFound" responseMode="ExecuteURL" />
</httpErrors>

View example

@inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage
@{
    Layout = "Layout.cshtml";

    //get site root node:
    var siteRoot = CurrentPage.Site();
}

<div class="container">
    <div class="row">
        <div class="col-md-12 col-sm-12 wow bounceInLeft">
            @{Html.RenderPartial("Breadcrumb");}
            <h3>@Model.Content.GetPropertyValue("pageNotFoundTitle")</h3>
            <img class="img-responsive" src="@Model.Content.GetCropUrl("interestMainImage", "mainImageCrop")" alt="@Model.Content.GetPropertyValue("interestTitle")" title="@Model.Content.GetPropertyValue("interestTitle")" />
            @Model.Content.GetPropertyValue("pageNotFoundContent")
        </div>      
    </div>
</div>

However, i have tried doing this in my umbraco install and im not really getting anywhere. The furthest i got is my page was rendering but not of the properties were displaying because it appeared to be redirecting to the home page and of course that doesnt have any of my properties as its not the currentPage.

Im a little confused, so any help or links to documentation to help me implement this functionality will be helpful.

Many thanks Paul