Custom sidebar content for pages (widgets?)

Hello,

I’m developing a custom theme, and have run into a snag. I’m using WordPress purely as a CMS (no blog), and have built the site out using pages. I originally thought I could just remove the sidebar from my page template and add my own custom HTML/CSS into TinyMCE editor to populate the pages. This worked great until I realized that TinyMCE doesn’t render a DIV based layout, and it seems to inject/remove chunks of code.

I’ve now decided to use widgets to populate the sidebars. How Can I setup a widget so that my client can edit it in a similar fashion to regular page content? Am I barking up the wrong tree here?

Thank you all very much.