Sweet! I recently got a friend into the game; he subbed the whole year! He was super confused about the new player experience so I emailed him a draft of this, and later posted on Reddit. Seems like a good place to put this.

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Alcast is one of the most popular resources in the game's ecosystem. He is a resource for builds. They're not always the best, but his other game guides are helpful.

Here's a few guides that'll help you start:
https://alcasthq.com/eso-new-player-beginner-guide/
https://alcasthq.com/eso-grind-guide/

For builds, I recommend Skinny Cheeks and Hack the Minotaur over Alcast.

I found this guide on playing content in chronological order, which is highly recommended for your first playthrough. 
https://www.thegamer.com/eso-time-chronological-order-play-guide/

Additional helpful links:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Onlinehttps://game-maps.com/ESO/The-Elder-Scrolls-Online.asp
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/525351/a-clear-step-by-step-guide-to-playing-eso-in-chronological-order/p1

Here's some tips for progressing your character more intently:
Get your Guild skill lines unlocked
1. Fighters Guild. This one is helpful because it has some good skills for increasing damage. It's probably the most natural of the guild skill lines to level and has the most relevance to playing the game.
2. Mages Guild. This is another helpful skill line. There are two really valuable skills, Inner Light and Meteor, which are good for magic-focused builds. There's also a skill - Balance - that's pretty essential to tanking builds. Leveling this is done through mages guild dailies and finding lorebooks in zones. I recommend doing this while you play through a zone. Using online guides help make it easier if you really want to pursue it. 
3. Undaunted. This has some good benefits for group play, along with some fun skills. You'll level this through the dungeon finder. 
4. Thieves Guild. This can be a fun skill line but it's not relevant to combat. It basically makes stealing and related crimes easier. 
5. Dark Brotherhood. This is another skill that's fun but not relevant to combat. It basically makes murdering NPCs and related crimes easier. 
6. Psijic. This has some useful skills but is a little bit of a grind to do. I recommend doing it after you've completed the base game as it will be sending you all over. 
7. Legerdemain. Helpful skill once maxed out, let's one-click open chest most of the time. You can level this by going to the two ships in Daggerfall's dock area and selling AND laundering the max you can each day. Takes me about a week to max out.
8. Assault/Support. Pop-in, do one battleground through group finder, and put a point in the Continuous Assault passive. This will help you go faster. You can also do the Alliance War Tutorial quest and get some skill points in the process.

Character setup stuff
1. Get your crafting writ certifications to unlock crafting writ daily quests.
2. Get antiquities unlocked and do each zone's leads as you play through them. This is another thing that's great for income and will eventually give you really powerful gear once maxed out. 
3. Get your free houses. There's a quest that lets you pick one inn room as a house to unlock. It's one per character, so you'd have to create a few alts just to get the unlocks, and you can delete them after if you want. I recommend getting the Rimmen house. These are super useful for traveling around really quickly. 
4. Use armory slots. Put the station in one of your free houses and then you can use it. You start with two build slots, so I recommend having one setup as a damage setup for questing and another for running group content.

Additional Recommendations
1. Train your mount daily.There's three attributes, speed, stamina, and capacity. Worry about stamina last, prioritize your horse running faster or carrying more items.
2. Running dungeons under activity finder is super beneficial. Once a day, you get a massive chunk of experience. I recommend running a healer setup to get in quickly and learn the flow of the game.
3. Deconstruct everything you get. You can do this at crafting stations or through Giladil. This will unlock gear on your Collections\Sets\ menu. Some zones have really good sets - like Mother's Sorrow in Deshaan. You can decon them now, and recreate them at max level once you hit it. It also levels your crafting skills and gives you materials for crafting. 
4. You can do crafting writs dailies. It gives you 5k gold per character a day at max level. 
5. Pick a home city for your dailies. Vivec is a good city to park your character for banking, crafting writs, and mount training. The only downside is you have to travel there via wayshrine, as there's no house near the main. I personally use Alinor in Summerset because it's really well laid out and has a well-lit outfit station. Rawl'kha is another good one, I recommend unlocking the Sleek Creek House there.