You really shouldn't mix the functional-oriented and object-oriented styles of CGI.pm - just use one. Since you have already typed $query numerous times, just remove qw/:standard/ from use CGI;.

If you only need one CGI instance, the FO style is very convienent and just looks cleaner, IMHO. The OO style goes quite well with HTML::Template:

use strict;
use CGI;
use HTML::Template;

my $q = CGI->new();
my $template = HTML::Template->new(
   filename  => 'some.tmpl',
   associate => $q,
);

# assign params to $template according to user input/validation

print $q->header, $template->output;
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The OO style also works nice for changing the behavior of CGI.pm, such as this silly example which changes the <h1> tag to 42:

use strict;
my $q = My::CGI->new;
print $q->h1('hello world'),$/;

package My::CGI;
use base qw(CGI);
sub h1 { "<42>$_[1]</42>" }
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jeffa

perl -MCGI=foo -le "print foo{bar=>baz},qux"
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