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I installed Raspbian on the Pi's SD card, and got the Raspberry Pi Zero to successfully boot up and connect to my home network via Ethernet (I don't have the Raspberry Pi Zero W, but instead the model without Wi-Fi).
I managed to SSH onto the Raspberry Pi with PuTTY, and when I tried to access the Pi via VNC, the connection just times out. I don't know why I would be able to connect to the Pi via PuTTY and not VNC.
Any ideas as to why this might be happening?
It is unclear what you have done to run VNC. It usually doesn't run out of the box. It may be possible that you have to do some installation/configuration to run the VNC-server in particular you are headless on the RasPi.
You already have managed to use ssh to login to the RasPi. That is needed to install/configure VNC from the command line. How to do it please follow the official documentation at VNC (Virtual Network Computing).
You can only connect via VNC if the Pi has a running GUI.
It is possible to create a virtual desktop on a headless machine if you want. There are tutorials describing this and you will find many posts on this site.
