Welcome.
The Ftdi is absolutely necessary as it allows the Ide to communicate and therefore program the esp, I gave up using a Usb to serial board as it was a right pain, I got one of these which does the same thing as the ftdi but also powers the esp and switches i/o 0 for you, I suggest you get one too, it'll save a lot of trouble:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ESP-01-E...871464?hash=item4b1485f8a8:g:SnYAAOSwhQhY25-2
Ok then my code probably isnt any use to you, besides the actual code I'm talking about strictly speaking belongs to me employers as its written for them.
What is eaxctly your problem, are you struggling to connect the esp to the net?, or having difficulties in programming.
Did you get the blink sketch to work, if not then thats the first priority, getting the esp to talk to the Ide can be a real pain, I used the espressive tool as well to recover a bad esp but I do have one that will not come back, however the Ide usally recovers a messed up esp.
Presuming you are able to program the esp try burning one of the examples, like the advanced web server, obviously you will need to change the defines in the sketch for your router ssid and password, you'll also need to find it a empty Ip address, you can do that by burning the Dhcp address printer sketch which is also in the esp examples, it displays via the serial monitor the ip that your router has assigned to it.
Run the text terminal in the Ide just before you program the esp, then when it finishes programming you'll get reports via serial from the esp as to what its doing, you should get the 'connected' message probably followed by the ip address its using, then just type this Ip address into your browser and away you go.
Dont forget you need to reserve this ip just mentioned and setup port forwarding on your router if you want to access the esp from another computer not on the same local net. The Ip you would then use to access from another pc would be your wanip, you can find this by typing whats my wanip into google.
If you report your findings I'll see what I can do you get you going.