Publishing is simply the act of uploading your web pages to your web site. Your web pages are available to the internet immediately after you upload them. Whether or not anyone can see your pages is a different issue.

By default, when a visitor uses your URL, the server looks for a file named named "index.html" or "index.htm", in that order. This is considered your home page. The rest of your pages can be named almost anything, as long as they have a ".html" or ".htm" extension.

Is one of the pages named "index.html" or "index.htm"?

If it is, just put your URL into a browsers address bar, and see what's out there. If you have trouble seeing it at first, give your browser a couple of refreshes (F5 or Ctrl-R).

Beyond that, there is not much information we ca give, because you haven't provided a URL to your site.