Building an Enterprise-Scale Website for IDX

Some time ago, we (konsep.net / netdesain) were entrusted by IDX — the Indonesia Stock Exchange, also known as Bursa Efek Indonesia (BEI) — to build the new www.idx.co.id. We built it on Microsoft technology (Windows Server, SQL Server, DotNetNuke, and more). One of the goals was to consolidate three sites that were running at the time (idx.co.id, the BES site, and one other) into a single comprehensive website; the old setup even mixed several different themes within one site as features and pages were bolted on.

I'd often used the old site myself, and it was fairly hard to navigate — the data was scattered, and some of it could only be reached via a public IP rather than a domain. So this was a project I'd been looking forward to.

Here are a few of the things that made this site harder than it might seem:

The site's core job is to give the public information about the exchange. Because BEI is such a large, well-organized institution, the process of gathering data, requesting confirmation, revising, and getting sign-off was long — we worked with a great many divisions. We were lucky to have a capable Project and IT team from BEI alongside us.
The data came from many different sources.
The timeline was short.
Security. This site is highly sensitive, so it had to be hardened against attackers. After we finished the first stage, IDX hired two other firms specifically to audit the security of our system.
Scalability and performance. The IDX site runs across several servers (proxy, load balancer, database, application, and file servers). BEI provided top-tier hardware at the time, and we ran stress tests to make sure everything held up while the market was open. For search, we used the paid Google Enterprise Search service.
Deploys had to happen outside normal hours. Because the site has to stay up while the market is trading, we could only make fixes and deploy after the market closed.
Some sections needed frequent data updates, in step with the market.

We were happy with the result, and we learned a great deal from the project. If we were trusted to build it again today, we'd make it far better still. :)