After consultation with professors Jose and Wendy who are teacher the GIS class, I have figured out generally what I need to do to really create a base layer. What I need to do is fix the projects for all the layers so that they are all on the same coordinate system (probably GCS World 1984). This should not be too hard, it is just taking more time since QGIS is a different platform from ArcGIS. I am also looking into the images that we have and using them as the basemap.

On another note, omni maps has still not called me back. So, we are unsure of the status of the maps we ordered several  months ago!