First Commercial Website

[concreteDonkey]

I'm currently developing a website for a family friend, who is starting an online retail business, using php/MySQL.

Currently, the owners want me to make an admin area of the website where they can process orders, update products database (ie, things that may require almost weekly attention) so that basically, the whole business is on the website.

My main concern is:
Would this be safe being part of the website (it will be in a password protected folder), or should I write a small app which does the maintenance stuff offline and updates the online version whenever they want it to?

I don't think I could commit to maintaining it for them because I'm at University so if they had some sort of crisis, I may not be available.
Should I just tell them to hire someone and leave them with the finished website (the customer side of it works at the moment)?

Another concern is that the pages which show the products are all dynamically created and so are the search engines going to find the site if someone searches for a named product?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[kamper]

Putting it all on the website could be secure if you are knowledgeable about potential exploits and audit your code very carefully. You'd also have to run ssl or find some other non-spoofable way of limiting where an admin can connect from. A seperate app would be theoretically safer. Any reason you couldn't continue to support them from university? You do have an internet connection there, right?

I'm not an expert on search engines, but you should get found if you don't have too many parameters in your urls (foo.php?foo=bar&shitzu=dog&up=down...) and if you are linked to from other places.