Static site set-up failure

Hello I am new here; before posting this i read relevant topics but did not find any usefulness in those posts.

i will highly appreciate if anyone could help me with my static site which seems to have eaten days of mine and no results, so frustrating!

background: i did as told on gohugo site for setting up a static site on gitlab; on my mac, hugo runs fine on server; i also followed the instructions fully and exactly, as to how to push the site to gitlab; the push was success.

however, the gohugo site mentions sth about CI and pipeline (which i did, to the best of my guess), and “ran the pipeline”.

problem: gohugo mentions that i should be able to see my site at the prescribed address.

but all i get is 404.

Question: what did i do wrong or what am i missing?

i thank in advance any real expert who can point me to the correct solution right after i pushed my site to gitlab and right before the pipeline topic on https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-gitlab/ which goes like this:

"That’s it! You can now follow the CI agent building your page at https://gitlab.com///pipelines."

thank you hugo-friends!

james