Just curious as to how my workflow should go? I’ve watched several tutorials now on how topology works, but when should I be doing this? The tutorials I watched were working on a sculpted head, should I sculpt my model first, then retopologize, then project and work details in? I apologize in advance for my newbness but I’m just trying to get a workflow down pat 
Well,
let’s say I’m in the same doubt, I mean, after watching a lot of tutorials and so on…
I can figure out that when the model isn’t answering you right during sculpting, for example, you’re doing details and polygons pop out abruptly or you need more geometry in some parts of your mesh, well, the topology could be a good solution instead of giving another global subdivision.
If you start an head from a highly divided sphere, maybe you don’t need retopology while sculpting, instead you need it when you want to finalize the head for some external program, in order to animate and/or to render the head, so you need the topology feature to make the head more usable.
For what I’ve learn, you need only to verify by yourself: sculpt an head from a sphere without retopology, then, at middle subdivision level, do a retopology and then sculpt from there and see how the mesh reacts.
Yeah, right now, I build a base mesh with zspheres and begin sculpting and global dividing as necessary, but eventually areas become too low to sculpt details or worse, areas are folded in with these strange creases that are difficult to remove. I tried masking and subdividing areas that needed more polys, but that just gave some extremely ugly borders between the higher poly and lower poly area.
A picture could help us to better figure out what’s wrong.
Anyway, this is why you should use the retopo feature to get out from those problems OR, as it’s usual to do, starting from a base mesh and maybe putting more geometry where you need.