Mordekaiser mains, I need your help!

Hello. I recently picked up trying to master Mordekaiser. I bought him him after the rework, and orginally liked his Q and W. At the moment I feel that the heal on w is insignifigant not only the given the health costs from yourself, but from minions as well. This is very difficult to work with because your shield depletes too quickly, and Morde's shiled generation is not too great. To top it off, Mordekaiser is squishy AND slow, and without his shield to be up, he takes tons of damage to his health, and dies very quickly. The best thing I'm starting to think to keep the shield up is Cooldown Reduction, since his shield is generated by damage from his ability, and main damage are his Q's plus the ability to land all three, which I think is unique for Mordekaiser as a champion. It adds for me an interesting and fun challenge to playing the champion Mordekaiser.

The problem is that between myself and minions, Mordekaiser cannot stay in lane with a lot of CDR, because he does to much damage to himself early. The CDR lets you have more shield, which is cool, but you poke yourself down quickly. Perhaps I am spamming my abilities too much. Anyways,it's starting to seem like Mordekaiser must build tank to negate the damage first, and damage later, or perhaps mix the 2(Morde is a juggernaut). I've also tried speedkaiser, as much as I could at the time, attackspeedkaiser, ADkaiser, and APkaiser. They are all fun in thier own way, but I die so much and would like some seasoned tips on how to play Mordekaiser properly, if you have some time to spare some words. Thank you.