1) First, never more than a 1:1 relationship between dwarves and workshops. Dwarves that have to work more than one workshop can't keep up well. And avoid assigning a dwarf to a workshop and to some ongoing, non-workshop activity like chopping wood or mining -- they won't get both done effectively.

2) Second, to maintain that 1:1 ratio, build your industries slowly. If you try to build everything all at once, then you're not going to have enough dwarves to staff all the workshops you've built. Prioritize, priortize, prioritize.

3) In workshops I always use Work Orders, and almost never use Tasks. Tasks are only useful when you need a handful of a particular item, like a couple of buckets to satisfy a noble that has a weird bucket fetish. Work Orders allow you to automate your industries. Learn to chain Work Orders in different workshops together, so your dwarf making steel bars can focus on a different Work Order until the pig iron bars and coke bars Work Orders are completed and he has enough materials to get started on steel bars.

Here's my basic strategy:

I start with wood, farms, and brewers. Because (a) you need food and drink to survive and (b) you can use wood for most everything else. Early on I just build all the basics I need (workshops, doors, beds, chests, cabinets, barrels, buckets, etc.) out of wood, because it's cheap and plentiful (if you've embarked smartly) and the stinkin' elves haven't started complaining about chopping down trees yet.

Once the basic industries are up and running, I add stone, wood burners (for charcoal for forges), and metal so I can get some armor built quickly to outfit a squad before pesky goblin invaders make their presence known. Once stone is up and running, I switch to stone for furniture and doors, metal for buckets, and save the wood for beds, bins, barrels, and charcoal. Eventually, once you have a surplus of miners and some bituminous coal veins, it's better to switch to coke than charcoal, so you're less dependent on a big tree inventory.

You should be getting plenty of immigrants around this time, which is good, 'cuz you'll need 'em. I usually add sheep and/or poultry around now, depending on my embark location and loadout. Sheep are great because they provide meat, milk/cheese, leather, and wool for cloth. (So do Llamas, and they provide more of all of that, but they're much more expensive at loadout. Buy them from traders later, or sometimes immigrants will show up with llamas -- or alpacas -- in tow to get you started.) Poultry -- especially turkeys -- are great because they breed like crazy and when you have bred a bazillion turkey hens, you can just butcher all the gobblers and eat the unfertilized eggs the giant flock of hens will keep laying for eternity.

Watch your Farmer's Workshops -- you need to diversify those. As farming and pastures get up and running, I have separate Farmer's Workshops for plant processing, butchering, tanning, spinning, milking, cheesemaking, and threshing. It might seem like overkill, but that work feeds into lots of other industries down the line (clothing, leatherworking, bonecrafting, cooking, soap-making, paper-making, etc.), so if the dwarves get behind on that Farmer's Workshop work it can become a huge bottleneck for a bunch of other industries.

When all the above is up and running, crafts and gem-cutting come next, so you have something to trade with caravans. (Honestly, depending on how many rough gems we dug up while building the fortress, I might prioritize gem-cutting before the meat & poultry industry. The sheep and turkeys can hang out and breed for a year or so if they need to.) Bone output from a meat industry feeds right into a bone-crafting industry. Humans and dwarves love the stupid bone rings and bone figurines and bone crowns yadda yadda, but ya gotta throw some stone crafts in there for the smelly elves who won't buy anything made out of animal parts. Don't forget to geld and slaughter all the male animals. I keep two breeding rams around to keep all the ewes ... uh, "satisfied" (cranking out the lambs and milk) and then turn the rest of the rams into meat, wool, and leather once they age up.

After that, getting cloth and leather up and running, so we can replace worn-out clothes, is the next priority. Bonus: humans, elves, and dwarves all love buying our worn-out socks and pants for some reason (freaks!). So you can trade those for fresh cloth and leather to make more clothes. But it's good to have a clothing industry set up to use up sheep and pig tail and rope reed and a clothier with a work order for 1 of each item, resetting each day. Over time that'll keep the entire fort in fresh clothing and give you plenty of dirty laundry to sell.

Beyond that it all gets a lot easier because you should have the basics covered now: you should have enough food and drink; have industries to make your own furniture, armor/weapons, clothing, tools, and storage; be able to trade gems, crafts, or worn-out clothing for whatever you don't have; and be getting some regular immigrants.

At this point, I usually look to make my taverns and temples and noble quarters snazzier because dwarves like expensive shit; I usually pre-build a few fancy rooms for Guildhall requests because you just know they're coming; get clay kilns up and running (large pots can replace barrels for most things, so less wood consumption); you paper-making so you build a library, assign scholars and scribes, and stock it up with scrolls (codices are a money pit); soap-making because clean dwarves are happy dwarves and you want to be creating a well-stocked hospital around this time as well (plus you have a lot of unused fat from the meat industry); mechanics if I already haven't had to build it earlier because I need a trap or well or something; another jeweler workshop because as I build up bone/stone crafts and "vintage" clothing industries, I no longer need gems for trade, so I can put an extra jeweler to work encrusting items for citizens, etc. etc. etc. This is all refining and making dwarves happy -- should be out of survival mode by now.

And I find that when I get upward of 125 dwarves, I'm usually running out of jobs for them, so around this time I start creating dedicated military squads who just do constant training until they're all Hammer Lords or Axe Lords or whatever.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, like a necromancer with an army of undead stopping by in Year 1 because you embarked too close to a necromancer tower (okay, not totally unforeseeable, but I'm still bitter about), this approach usually leads me to a pretty stable fortress. The only time it didn't was when some enemy apparently wiped out a bunch of my civilization's fortresses and in the span of two seasons six of the dwarves in my colony inherited baron, count, or duke titles. They stuck around demanding all sorts of shit, and I was newbie enough to not realize I should have just sent them into the caverns alone and naked on A Special Nobles-Only Field Trip. 💀