Unbelievable Abigail-II!
That's almost exactly how I got into this as well, in the time of Spry Mosaic (with an external app to view JPEGs and you couldn't edit files and view locally, they had to be posted online before you could view the results). My boss, ever the impetuous sort went out and bought a machine for hosting, handed me a CD with a large collection of art/typographical stuff that we where involved with and said, "get this online by the end of the week".

New change of underwear please... ;^)

I used Perl (at the suggestion of a very good friend of mine) who had been using it for JANet projects for a number of years, and immediately 'fell for it', frankly I just loved it, it also saved my bacon as we got the site up and running within the time allowed by my boss. As it turns out the site was a roaring success, highly accoladed by the design magazines of the era and I stuck with the Web and programming Perl because of that project.