Welcome to the game and the forums, Noele! The posters above me have given good advice with Mykan's Guide and the Gems of Knowledge website. There are a couple of other sites I find very helpful:
ElvenArchitect at
http://www.elvenarchitect.com/
In the City Planner you can play around with arranging your city on a grid before actually having to do it in-game. You can also play around with different military units to get a better feel for how they perform.
ElvenStats at
https://www.elvenstats.com/
This site provides the info you could get from any city by visiting it, but does the work for you and compiles stats on both players and fellowships. They also provide a copy/paste weekly update for fellowships that's really nice to send out to all the members showing their progress. If you enter your name and go to the page with your stats, there's also a link to import your city to ElvenArchitect (after you click that tiny blue arrows in a circle thingy, it will update to your current arrangement and load it into Architect; otherwise it will probably be your city from last Sunday as that is the day the site auto updates). While you will still have to make the changes yourself in-game, I find it helps to not have to build it from scratch first and then play with moving things around.
It may take a bit to get comfortable with both those sites and where to find stuff, but I find it well worth it to do so.
Happy Gaming!