3D Opal Kinda Has Problems (Patreon)

Sort of putting this out there to both show off what she looks like (...gotta darken those nostrils) and do an open ask for those of you who might have some experience/advice with this o^o; I'm pretty happy with how she looks overall but have no idea how to properly rig a snake with the intent of animating her like cartoon snakes and the info I could glean from youtube searches don't seem to be what I'm looking for. 

I tried to accomplish this in a variety of ways and made made a bone rig wherein IK's control the next X number of bones behind them. Everything in front of the 'neck' faces forwards and the other 85% of her body points the other direction so that her 'face doesn't get pulled out of position every time I try to move a coil. All in all it's pretty cumbersome to use—and it's possibly because I needed more control bones, but also am hoping that there are more sophisticated ways of designing the rig. 

One of the issues is that the control bones won't move with the parts that they correspond with—i.e., if you start coiling up the body closer to the head from the middle, the tail will move towards that location but the control bones stay way in the back, making it harder to tell which control is which when you end up with like 2 dozen of them in a similar location. I don't know if all of this is normal or if there are better ways to do all that because I know almost nothing about rigging and everything I've done until now involves manually moving bones individually, which I at least know is not what people really *do* for animating anything, especially for a character with over 100 bones in her body o~o; I tried binding her to a curve but those don't have sit geometry and can easily cause so much undesired squash and stretching.

Anyway that is my rant, advice/links to tutorials would be appreciated ;~;