Before venturing further, I personally would be helped more if you clarified...

I'd like to engrain the login process into a web page

I will assume you mean you want a web based form where the user can enter the credentials, and then you can do some server-side magic to authenticate. With that assumption...

This is such a basic web requirement that I would hesitate to offer long advice here. CGI-Session, as mentioned above, is indeed a nice option.

You can roll your own using Storable to save the password info in a file, use DB_File to save it in a dbm, or use DBI to put the info in a SQL database. You will need some kind of persitence (saving the state) so your user can be remembered by your website. Rolling your own is a good way to learn. However, reading the CGI-Session docs is also advised. The author has created very good documentation, and also has a cookbook style recipe for creating authentication.

Hope all this starts you in the right direction.