So you've just created a GitLab repo and push the git working directory contents to it but the page does not change from the default instructions.
To fix this log on to the gitlab server and perform the following command as root:
# gitlab-rake cache:clear
This is on the following GitLab CE:
GitLab 8.13.3
GitLab Shell 3.6.6
GitLab Workhorse 0.8.5
GitLab API v3
Git 2.7.4
Ruby 2.3.1p112
Rails 4.2.7.1
PostgreSQL 9.2.18