I have created a survey, but the message 'No available surveys' is merely shown on my LimeSurvey homepage?

By default, surveys are not listed on the public index page of your LimeSurvey installation for privacy reasons - better safe than sorry.
If you want a survey to be listed on that page, just edit the survey 'General settings', choose the tab 'Publication & access control' and activate the setting 'List survey publicly'.