What is a good way of securing an admin area?

[eluser]0v3rth3d4wn[/eluser]
Where do you place your admin login form and what is a good way to secure it?
Is something like http://www.mysite.com/admin a bad idea and insecure (the admin redirects to a page with a login form for the administrator)?
Should I use htpasswd for better security?
Please state your opinion.

[eluser]kr1pt[/eluser]
I think the best security is program written in C++. You open program, it requires login, you can login only if you have let's say field 'is_admin' = 1 in the database You are the only one who has it

If you have no programmer and no C++/C knowledge, you can do same from the admin.mysite.com or mysite.com/admin.

[eluser]timpiele[/eluser]
[quote author="kr1pt" date="1330984750"]I think the best security is program written in C++. You open program, it requires login, you can login only if you have let's say field 'is_admin' = 1 in the database You are the only one who has it

If you have no programmer and no C++/C knowledge, you can do same from the admin.mysite.com or mysite.com/admin.[/quote]

wut?

Security by obscurity (hiding things) is a bad idea, it's a false sense of security. I create a login form that use the jquery $.post method to pass data to a controller, which if the login is successful sets a session variable and sends TRUE or FALSE back to the jquery...