Thank you again. Oh I'll go look up tutorials. That will give me something to do while I wait for payday LOL
There's quite a lot of Planet Zoo tutorials around now but if you get stuck sometimes the Planet Coaster tutorials can be helpful, especially with the building systems etc. Like you I'm not really a builder but it's getting to the point now where the Workshop is well populated with some great builds. All I'd say is be a bit careful with some of the more elaborate creations - for the people who love to build they can use a lot of pieces to make really intricate stuff but if, like me, you want to build a prettty extensive zoo then having too many can completely slow down your frame rate. Sometimes I take them off the workshop but then do some stripping back to make them more usable. My big hint here is to use terrain to make your zoo interesting visually not just buildings. It took me a while to get that but now in my franchise zoos I'm really starting to play around with the terrain tools.
Builders often also only play in Sandbox mode with settings like animal welfare turned off so not every workshop creation will work if you are more of a management player like me.
Many of the bigger Planet zoo youtubers are also quite realism focused which I'm not so there's often things I change because I'm not worried about it looking like an actual working zoo. Totally depends on your play style. I would also recommend playing through the career mode, I know not everyone likes it but I think it's really helpful for demonstrating the kinds of things you can do - that and downloading and exploring a few players zoos helped me get some inspiration.
Personally I like the constraints of franchise mode and only being able to get the animals I want sporadically but my advice would be to try all the modes and play around with the settings until you find what suits you best. There's quite a few options and it can be a bit daunting to start with. It's pretty forgiving but when things go wrong early in a zoo it can go downhill pretty quick. There's some good guides to the two most important management mechanics out there - guest happiness (getting donations) and animal breeding / welfare. The guest happiness one in particular it's worth reading up about a bit - it's not completely intuitive and some of the feedback loops are totally hidden (e.g. understanding that benches can really help keep people happy or that transport rides will rarely make money so they aren't good early on but eventually are worth it to get people moving across long distances).
Essay over, hope it's helpful!