Public Website Admin Tools: Divide and Conquer

One of the first steps when designing a web application is figuring out how to administer the beast and where these admin tools should live. Often this comes down to one key question: should the public website itself also be the administrative tool? While there is no single approach that works in every situation, I generally find that keeping the administrative tools separate makes more sense than embedding the tools within the public facing website. And here's why.