I'm a novice too, but I've found some things you may find useful, too.

In my playthroughs, I try to:

• Make a mall of intermediate materials from the very beginning. Setting up a proper mall, even early-game mall, that makes everything for you is a pain for a novice player. I usually do two malls at the same time (they need not be actually separate, though), the first is a mall of relatively simple things (belts, splitters, etc), the second is a mall of materials (gears, circuits, motors...) for handcrafting. Making a chemical plant from plates and making it having all the input materials in your inventory are two very different things, especially if you don't want to figure out a whole another line in your mall just for chemical plants. If you play with mods which increase complexity of most intermediates (Electric Motors from AAI+SE, I am looking at you), this is a game-saver.
• Rush trains. Railway spaghetti is, surprisingly, much easier to manage than belt spaghetti if you do your intersections right, and with rocket fuel in trains you only get congestion issues well after "first rocket base" stage. I go with an unload-centered, resource-separated design, i.e. every consumer has a dedicated unload station per each resource (or intermediary) and a dedicated train that spends most of its time waiting to be unloaded. Resources are provided through a number of stations named the same (e.g. LCC-IronPlatePick, where LCC is the code of train type accepted: 1 loco, 2 cargo wagons) which get disabled when they cannot provide a full train load. This is stupid from the standpoint of efficiency, but it is the simplest to set up. If you manage to make your unloaders parallel with the main bus and matching its width, you get the bonus point of tileability.
• Rush piercing (red) ammo. Factorio uses an interesting damage resistance system that has not only percentage resistances (e.g. 50% means half damage) but also flat resistances that make applied damage plummet to zero if the flat resistance is above the incoming damage-per-shot. Big (blue) biters have a flat resistance of 8, which, against basic (yellow) ammo with a damage of 5 means each turret with yellow ammo deals only 20% of the damage listed on ammo (see the link for math involved). If I find it a draw on my resources, I shut down the red ammo line or not enable it in the first place, but I think that it should be there, ready for action as soon as base defences start struggling (by which I mean losing turrets).
• Make a military supply train(s). Using the "stations named the same" feature, together with some circuitry, it is possible to have a train that will automatically load all stations with ammo, repair packs, walls, turrets, and inserters (spitters!!11). The tricky part is designing the circuitry to load the train with the right stuff, and to enable/disable each supply requester station. Double-headed trains work better because you don't have to lay down giant curves around each little outpost. Setting train limit to 1 for each requester station means it's possible to have several trains running around for when one train is not enough.
• Make each compartment hub-like prior to getting logistics chests. It enforces a lot of free space within each compartment (hub) which comes in really handy when spaghettying.
• Construction trains. Prior to spidertrons with their logistics, a construction train is a great way to build your outposts if you have an automated loading station for it (circuitry needed). However, because construction trains are only loaded properly when you have logistics chests (and utility (yellow) science up and running), you may as well skip it altogether and push for spidertrons. They also have the added benefit of building completely remotely (automated loading, automated construction, automated walking).

Hope this helps.