I am a one-person team, doing both the design and coding for my company's Intra- and Inter- nets. I started out using HERE documents within my cgi scripts. I like the convenience of having everything contained in a single program, and since I don't have anyone else involved it's worked out ok.

However, things change, and the 2 sites are getting larger and perhaps someday I'll have help. I'm currently re-building our Intranet site and since I'm touching everything anyway, I decided to convert some of my old code to HTML Templates.

Initially, I was frustrated with my efforts. While there is documentation available, most of it struck me as being less than instructive. The examples seemed simplistic and not in-depth. I think most of it was written from the perspective of coding, not combining code and design. I persisted though, and now I think I was trying to make things way too complicated.

I did a super search and found an HTML::Template Tutorial and another node on Loop Context Style with HTML::Template. Things seem to have clicked into place and I think I'm on my way to becoming an HTML::Template convert. I made progress today and converted 2 scripts in short order. It gets easier from here. While I can still see good reasons for keeping everything tidy in one script, I can now see other good reasons for pulling it all apart. I think it all depends on what your needs are. I do recommend learning to use Templates, though, as it just adds another option to your toolchest.