I used to do exactly what you describe, building static pages from text files (and also catalog databases) where I didn't need to worry about rapidly changing content. There are many applications where this is the case, and in today's world of large caches and huge disks (200 GigaBytes??? My first computer {see homenode} had 2048 by 16 bits total read-write memory!!!), static pages are a viable option.

I would look at HTML::Template and HTML::Embperl, but I'd also consider spending some cycles learning the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) style definition language, or, at least, enough to become dangerous. Google for CSS tutorials, you'll find lots, and O'Reilly's CSS book is (while somewhat obsolete) good to have handy. You'll find that your HTML can become really plain and as easy to generate from Perl as you did from C.

One thing that templating systems like TT and EP give you that's really handy is the ability to build tables on the fly from arrays. In EP, defining one table row with the $row and $col special variables gives me an entire table from whatever source I choose, be it a tab-text table sucked in and split(/\t/), or a MySQL query result array. I've got a complete application that displays and graphs data from hundreds of different tests on three different chip families that is composed of three HTML/Embperl files, a MySQL database, and a few supporting insert files. Yes, this is dynamic HTML rather than static, but you can choose how much is dynamic and how much is static when you have a templating tool that handles both options.