I spent most of my adult life in the IT industry. You might think that that gave me a massive advantage when it came to starting a website, but it really didn’t. In spite of having worked on a fair few websites over the years, my focus was always on business logic, data storage and all those things that lie beneath the surface. When I came to creating my own satire site a few months ago, I quickly came to realise that I actually knew very little about the internet.

Sure, I probably had a better idea than many about the mechanics of the web — DNS, IP, HTML and all those other acronyms actually meant something to me — but when it came to the cultural and commercial aspects of the ‘net, I was a stranger in a very strange land.

The internet had always been a work tool for me. My use of it had primarily been for technical purposes. I’d written the odd article and interacted on techie forums such as Code Project and Stack Exchange. I’d bought the odd thing on Amazon and very occasionally looked at Facebook. Beyond that, the internet was simply a place to check the weather forecast and find the sports results. Whilst I was always aware that I was in a small corner of a big field, I had completely lost sight of quite how enormous that field had become.

After several weeks of throwing content together in a rather haphazard way, I began to properly realise what I already knew. This was not going to go anywhere unless I started to get my head around the environment in which I was intending to operate.

It was time to confront my first real hurdle: social media. To be honest, my terror of social media was largely rooted in the first word. I’m simply not a social animal. Nobody, but nobody, has ever accused me of being a “people person”. How on Earth was I going to climb this particular mountain?

The answer to that one turned out to be refreshingly simple. Get in there and do it. I set myself a few ground rules and have refined them a little along the way. If you stick to a simple set of values, people do tend to react positively and your network will grow gently and steadily without any need for gimmicks. There are plenty of articles out there telling you how to get a zillion Twitter followers in a nano-second but even if they do work, they won’t lead you to the sort of people that you can form a meaningful connection with. For anyone else relatively inexperienced in the social media world, I’d simply suggest the following:

· Take an interest in others.

· Don’t rant, swear or be gratuitously provocative (sadly, some do seem to succeed this way but it’s a silly game to play and it will get you a very low class of follower).

· Speak when you’ve got something worth saying. One good post is worth a hundred meaningless ones.

· Don’t waste time arguing with idiots. You cannot cure an idiot, don’t even try.

· Help people. Whether it’s advice, encouragement or sympathy that’s required, offer it where you can. “Do unto others …” is every bit as much the golden rule on the internet as it is in the real world.

· Don’t plug yourself too much but equally don’t be afraid to share your work from time to time. Be cautious and the balance will find itself.

If I were starting out again, I would establish a social media presence before beginning on the website. Getting an organic traffic flow is not an overnight process and social traffic is going to be your mainstay for quite a while.

Your long-term objective, though, is always going to be that steady stream of search engine traffic. Sadly, SEO, is a must. I don’t like SEO; I think it stifles creativity and allows the search engine providers to force an unwelcome conformity on content but it’s a necessary evil and we all have to live with it. Read about it. Read about it again. And again. Field of Dreams is a truly wonderful movie but don’t kid yourself into thinking that if you build it, they will come. SEO is a bullet that you’re simply going to have to bite at some point and you might as well bite it early on.

If you’re a WordPress user, get yourself a free Rank Math or Yoast plugin and use it from day one. Don’t do what I did and retroactively optimise fifty-odd posts in one sitting. It’s perfectly doable but I can assure you that you won’t enjoy doing it. Whatever your motives for starting a website, whether it’s to create something, to champion a cause or to promote a business, the chances are that you’re not doing it so you can stay up for nights on end just to jiggle keyword densities. You want to be doing the things that you set out to do.

Maybe the biggest realisation of all, though, in the latest leg of my internet journey is something that should have been blindly obvious all along. It’s something that I maybe only noticed out of the corner of my eye in my years sat at a desk, looking at coding sites on a PC. The internet no longer lives on the desktop.

In my world, everything happens on a laptop these days, but that makes me very much the exception rather than the rule in the modern world. Whatever you build, build it for mobile first. Look into technologies like AMP (accelerated mobile pages) — there are pros and cons, so don’t just jump into it, but do invest a good chunk of your research time in that direction. An initially dismissive attitude towards mobiles has probably cost me more progress than any other mistake I’ve made along the way.

The way that you use the internet may not be the way that rest of the world uses it. Don’t lose sight of that the way I did.

I’m no guru, I don’t have a hyper-successful site to wave around (hopefully that bit will change) but I will offer one simple piece of advice based on what I’ve learnt the hard way. Know the lay of the land before you build your house.

As a software developer, I would always make a point of sitting on my hands for a while before touching a keyboard. I’d make sure that everything was straight in my head before I began to write code. An hour’s thinking could save weeks of problem fixing. I really do wish that I’d taken the same approach with my website.

And therein lies possibly the most important lesson of all, never be afraid to apply the wisdom you’ve acquired doing other things to what you’re doing now. There’s no such thing as irrelevant experience.