Soft Launch of the IDX Website

We've just soft-launched the new Indonesia Stock Exchange website. Broadly, what we did was redesign the old IDX site, which had gone quite a while without a proper update. Before we started, there were at least three separate sites — the old IDX, a second IDX version, and BES (the Surabaya Stock Exchange).

The site is built on Microsoft technology (Windows Server 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, SQL Server 2008). We used DotNetNuke, one of the more stable web frameworks in the Microsoft world, and Telerik for charting. One distinctive choice on the IDX site was an internal search engine powered by Google Site Search, which searches across all of our pages and documents — a searching capability provided by Google, the experts at it.

The challenges we faced:

Designing a strong concept for the site — simple, but with solid functionality.
Communicating with existing systems; some data is prepared by other applications' back ends.
Making the application robust and ready for heavy traffic, including the very important data it holds.
Running it on a reliable server configuration to minimize downtime.
And because IDX is one of the important symbols of Indonesia's economy, it was personally a little nerve-racking — though, happily, the whole IDX team was very cooperative.

This site has now finished its first phase; we're looking ahead to the next: a mobile web version.